The aprosody of schizophrenia: Computationally derived acoustic phonetic underpinnings of monotone speech.
OBJECTIVE
Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that, compared to controls and patients without clinically rated aprosody, patients with aprosody would exhibit reduced variability in: pitch (F0), jaw/mouth opening and tongue height (formant F1), tongue front/back position and/or lip rounding (formant F2), and intensity/loudness.


METHODS
Audiorecorded speech was obtained from 98 patients (including 25 with clinically rated aprosody and 29 without) and 102 unaffected controls using five tasks: one describing a drawing, two based on spontaneous speech elicited through a question (Tasks 2 and 3), and two based on reading prose excerpts (Tasks 4 and 5). We compared groups on variation in pitch (F0), formant F1 and F2, and intensity/loudness.


RESULTS
Regarding pitch variation, patients with aprosody differed significantly from controls in Task 5 in both unadjusted tests and those adjusted for sociodemographics. For the standard deviation (SD) of F1, no significant differences were found in adjusted tests. Regarding SD of F2, patients with aprosody had lower values than controls in Task 3, 4, and 5. For variation in intensity/loudness, patients with aprosody had lower values than patients without aprosody and controls across the five tasks.


CONCLUSIONS
Findings could represent a step toward developing new methods for measuring and tracking the severity of this specific negative symptom using acoustic phonetic parameters; such work is relevant to other psychiatric and neurological disorders.
['Compton|Michael T|MT|', 'Lunden|Anya|A|', 'Cleary|Sean D|SD|', 'Pauselli|Luca|L|', 'Alolayan|Yazeed|Y|', 'Halpern|Brooke|B|', 'Broussard|Beth|B|', 'Crisafio|Anthony|A|', 'Capulong|Leslie|L|', 'Balducci|Pierfrancesco Maria|PM|', 'Bernardini|Francesco|F|', 'Covington|Michael A|MA|']
D000328:Adult D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D010700:Phonetics D011578:Psycholinguistics D011618:Psychotic Disorders D012559:Schizophrenia D013061:Speech Acoustics D013064:Speech Disorders D013068:Speech Production Measurement
Aprosody Schizophrenia Phonetics Negative symptoms Acoustic resonance Linguistics Phonology Psychosis