Speedie L J, Brake N, Folstein S E, Bowers D, Heilman K M
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore School of Medicine, Maryland.
J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1990 Jul;53(7):607-10. doi: 10.1136/jnnp.53.7.607.
Patients with Huntington's Disease (HD) who were without dementia were compared to unilateral stroke patients and controls as previously reported in 1983, to discover if they had a prosodic defect. Subjects were presented tape-recorded speech filtered sentences and asked to indicate the tone of voice as happy, sad or angry (affective prosody), or as a question, command or statement (propositional prosody). HD patients were impaired in comprehension of both types of prosody compared to controls but were not different from stroke patients. A second study compared early HD patients with at-risk siblings and spouse controls on comprehension of affective and propositional prosody, discrimination of both types of prosody, rhythm discrimination and tonal memory (Seashore tests). HD patients were impaired in both comprehension and discrimination of all types of prosody. HD patients were less accurate than at-risk patients on the tonal memory task but not on the rhythm discrimination task. These findings suggest compromise in ability to understand the more subtle prosodic aspects of communication which may contribute to social impairment of HD patients very early in the course of the disease.
将未患痴呆症的亨廷顿舞蹈症（HD）患者与单侧中风患者及对照组进行比较（如1983年之前所报道），以探究他们是否存在韵律缺陷。研究对象收听经磁带录制并过滤的语音句子，并被要求指出语音语调是开心、悲伤还是愤怒（情感韵律），或是疑问句、祈使句还是陈述句（命题韵律）。与对照组相比，HD患者在理解这两种韵律方面均存在障碍，但与中风患者并无差异。第二项研究将早期HD患者与有患病风险的亲属及配偶对照组在情感韵律和命题韵律的理解、两种韵律的辨别、节奏辨别及音调记忆（西肖尔测试）方面进行了比较。HD患者在所有类型韵律的理解和辨别方面均存在障碍。在音调记忆任务中，HD患者的表现不如有患病风险的患者，但在节奏辨别任务中并非如此。这些发现表明，HD患者理解交流中更细微韵律方面的能力受损，这可能在疾病早期就导致其社交障碍。
