CNRS, LPL, UMR 7309, Aix-Marseille Université Aix-en-Provence, France.
EA 3279 - Public Health, Chronic Diseases and Quality of Life - Research Unit, Aix-Marseille Université Marseille, France ; Department of Psychiatry, Sainte-Marguerite University Hospital Marseille, France.
Front Psychol. 2014 Jul 18;5:755. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00755. eCollection 2014.
Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) often display social cognition disorders, including Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments and communication disruptions. Thought language disorders appear to be primarily a disruption of pragmatics, SZ can also experience difficulties at other linguistic levels including the prosodic one. Here, using an interactive paradigm, we showed that SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode the contrastive status of discourse referents in French. We used a semi-spontaneous task to elicit noun-adjective pairs in which the noun in the second noun-adjective fragment was identical to the noun in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron "brown candies" vs. BONBONS violets "purple candies") or could contrast with it (e.g., BOUGIES violettes "purple candles" vs. BONBONS violets "purple candies"). We found that healthy controls parsed the target noun in the second noun-adjective fragment separately from the color adjective, to warn their interlocutor that this noun constituted a contrastive entity (e.g., BOUGIES violettes followed by [BONBONS] [violets]) compared to when it referred to the same object as in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron followed by [BONBONS violets]). On the contrary, SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode contrastive status of target nouns. In addition, SZ's difficulties to use prosody of contrast were correlated to their score in a classical ToM task (i.e., the hinting task). Taken together, our data provide evidence that SZ patients exhibit difficulties to prosodically encode discourse statuses and sketch a potential relationship between ToM and the use of linguistic prosody.
精神分裂症（SZ）患者常表现出社会认知障碍，包括心理理论（ToM）障碍和沟通障碍。言语思维障碍似乎主要是语用学的中断，SZ 也可能在其他语言层面（包括韵律层面）遇到困难。在这里，我们使用互动范式表明，SZ 个体没有使用韵律结构来编码法语中话语参照的对比状态。我们使用半自发任务引出名词-形容词对，其中第二个名词-形容词片段中的名词与第一个片段中的名词相同（例如，BONBONS marron“棕色糖果”与 BONBONS violets“紫色糖果”相比）或可以与之形成对比（例如，BOUGIES violettes“紫色蜡烛”与 BONBONS violets“紫色糖果”相比）。我们发现，健康对照组将第二个名词-形容词片段中的目标名词与颜色形容词分开分析，以警告他们的对话者，这个名词构成了一个对比实体（例如，BOUGIES violettes 后面跟着 [BONBONS] [violets]），与它在第一个片段中指代相同对象时（例如，BONBONS marron 后面跟着 [BONBONS violets]）相比。相反，SZ 个体没有使用韵律结构来编码目标名词的对比状态。此外，SZ 个体使用韵律对比的困难程度与他们在经典 ToM 任务（即暗示任务）中的得分相关。总之，我们的数据提供了证据表明，SZ 患者在韵律编码话语状态方面存在困难，并描绘了心理理论和语言韵律使用之间的潜在关系。
