Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece.
PLoS One. 2023 Oct 5;18(10):e0292325. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0292325. eCollection 2023.
Patients with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia and individuals receiving a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder without accompanying intellectual impairment (ASD w/o intellectual impairment) during their adulthood share several clinical characteristics. Exploring under-investigated aspects of these two clinical conditions may shed light on their possible connection and facilitate differential diagnosis at very early stages. To this end, we explored the ability of 15 adults with a recent diagnosis of schizophrenia, 15 individuals diagnosed with ASD w/o intellectual impairment as adults, and 15 healthy adults to resolve sentence ambiguities with the use of syntactic prosody, and to decode happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, and neutrality based on affective prosody. Results revealed intact perception of syntactic prosody in adults with schizophrenia, but impaired affective prosody recognition, which could be attributed, however, to emotion processing difficulties overall. On the other hand, individuals with ASD w/o intellectual impairment were impaired on prosody comprehension per se, as evidenced in the most challenging conditions, namely the subject-reading condition and the emotion of surprise. The differences in prosody comprehension ability between the two clinical conditions may serve as an indicator, among other signs, during the diagnostic evaluation.
近期被诊断为精神分裂症的患者和成年后被诊断为自闭症谱系障碍但不伴有智力障碍（ASD w/o 智力障碍）的个体具有一些共同的临床特征。探索这两种临床病症中一些研究较少的方面可能有助于阐明它们之间的可能联系，并在早期阶段促进鉴别诊断。为此，我们探索了 15 名近期被诊断为精神分裂症的成年人、15 名成年后被诊断为 ASD w/o 智力障碍的个体以及 15 名健康成年人在使用句法韵律解决句子歧义、基于情感韵律解码快乐、愤怒、悲伤、惊讶、恐惧和中性的能力。结果显示，精神分裂症患者的句法韵律感知能力完好，但情感韵律识别受损，然而，这可能归因于整体的情绪处理困难。另一方面，ASD w/o 智力障碍的个体本身在韵律理解方面存在障碍，这在最具挑战性的条件下表现出来，即主语阅读条件和惊讶情绪。这两种临床病症在韵律理解能力上的差异可能是诊断评估中的一个指标，其他迹象也可以作为辅助。
