Neurostructural correlates of prosody in schizophrenia.
Item
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Title
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Neurostructural correlates of prosody in schizophrenia.
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Identifier
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AAI3231952
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identifier
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3231952
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Creator
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Leitman, David I.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Daniel C. Javitt
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Physiological | Psychology, Clinical
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Abstract
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Social cognitive impairment is an enduring and debilitating aspect of schizophrenia, an illness that affects roughly one percent of the population worldwide. This dysfunction hinders those it afflicts in their ability to integrate into society, form interpersonal relationships, and remain gainfully employed. Over the past fifty years, researchers have attempted to study these deficits by assessing emotion perception of facial and vocal gestures.;Recent attention to sensory deficits within the visual and aural modalities has raised the possibility that social cognitive impairment in schizophrenia may result from both misperception and misinterpretation . This may reflect low-level and feed-forward, as well as higher-order and "top down" dysfunction. We conducted a series of studies with the aim of relating elemental audio-sensory processing deficits to the perception of vocal affect (prosody) in patients with schizophrenia. These studies revealed the following results. First, we observed large effect size (1.6 sd's) deficits in affective prosodic perception that were associated with poor global functioning. Second, we found that within-modality sensory disturbance (specifically-pitch perception) performance, as well as executive processing, predicted affective prosodic dysfunction. Third, we observed that both pitch perception deficits and dysprosodia in patients were associated with white matter integrity estimates within fiber pathways of auditory processing regions in the brain. Fourth, we observed that prosodic deficits extended to the perception of sarcasm and counterfactual intent in interpersonal communicatory discourse. In addition to these affect-related prosodic deficits, we also found large effect size deficits in the perception of non-affective prosody distinctions, such as decoding interrogative versus declarative intent, and recognition of differential stress patterns within speech ("stress prosody"). Like their affective counterparts, audio-sensory processing and executive processing disturbance also significantly predicted non-affective prosodic deficits.;Taken together, these findings suggest that schizophrenia dysprosodia reflects a social communicatory dysfunction that is caused by neural deficits across multiple levels of cognition. This dysfunction begins with a deficiency in perception of core elemental acoustic cues and compounds with higher cognitive dysfunction. This results in perceptual deficits of affective, as well as non-affective vocal intent in the illness.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
