No abstract

No abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) causes impairments in both perception and production of speech. The link between perception and production disorders in PD is, however, not well known. In this study, we examined whether there is a relationship between perception and production of intonation in French in PD individuals. Fifteen PDs and fifteen age-matched controls discriminated questions and statements in auditory-only, visual-only and audiovisual modalities. They were also asked to produce these utterances while their voice was recorded. Participants had to process intonation cues to discriminate between yes-no questions and statements in the perception task and to mark these utterances in the production task. Our results showed that PDs marked their questions and statements less than controls: the F0 rise at the end of the questions was smaller in PDs and contrary to controls, no F0 fall was observed at the end of the statements produced by PDs. Importantly, PDs who were more impaired in marking questions and statements were poorer at discriminating between these utterances in the perception task. These findings suggest that dysprosody in PD weaken the performance of PD individuals in processing prosody cues during speech perception.

Two major works in recent evolutionary biology have in different ways touched upon the issue of cultural replicators in language, namely Dawkins' Selfish Gene and Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's Major Transitions in Evolution. In the latter, the emergence of language is referred to as the last major transition in evolution (for the time being), a claim we argue to be derived from a crucial property of language, called Duality of Patterning. Prima facie, this property makes natural language look like a structural equivalent to DNA, and its peer in terms of expressive power. We will argue that, if one takes seriously Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's outlook and examines what has been proposed as linguistic replicators, amongst others phonemes and words, the analogy meme-gene becomes problematic. A key issue is the fact that genes and memes are assumed to carry and transmit information, while what has been described as the best candidate for replicatorhood in language, i.e. the phoneme, does by definition not carry meaning. We will argue that semiotic systems with Duality of Pattering (like natural languages) force us to reconsider either the analogy between replicators in the biological and the cultural domain, or what it is to be a replicator in linguistics.