Two central characteristics of schizophrenia are blunted affect and impaired social functioning. Previous studies have shown consistent impairment in the ability to interpret, as well as to express emotional and semantic content of speech as conveyed by pitch, stress and rhythm of the speech utterance (prosody). Classically these deficits have been seen within the context of emotional disturbance in schizophrenia. However, basic audio- psychophysical studies have shown fundamental deficits in pitch perception of simple tones in schizophrenics. These studies have shown electrophysiological evidence of auditory deficits in the generation of an """"""""echoic template"""""""" for tones present at even the earliest stage of cortical analysis. Yet to this author's knowledge, no research has shown a connection between early cortical pitch perception and prosodic deficits. In the proposed study, a battery of tasks examining early cortical auditory deficits as well as musical and prosodic deficits will be administered to patients with schizophrenia and control subjects at the Nathan Kline Institute. A second experiment will employ new stimuli developed during the course of this project. These will be used in an ERP paradigm that will directly test the relationship between pitch contour recognition and prosodic comprehension. It is hypothesized that deficits in pre-attentive performance on the auditory tone-matching task will contribute significantly to deficits in higher order sensory-auditory analysis. These deficits will lead to impaired processing of pitch contours within music and integral to the proper prosodic processing of speech. It is further hypothesized that the magnitude and presence of these deficits will be related to patient symptomology. An understanding of the nature of prosodic deficits in schizophrenia should prove valuable for diagnosis, treatment and etiological understanding of the illness.
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