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.

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The aim of this study was to test if the meaning of intonational contours involves speaker commitment and attitude attribution to the addressee. We examined whether the pragmatic choice of a contour signals how the speaker (S) anticipates the reaction of the addressee (A) to his utterance by attributing attitudes to him and calling for his next move. We focused on four French contours (a fall L*L%, a rise H*H%, a rise-fall H*L% and a rise-fall-rise H+!H*H%). In an original forced-choice interpretation task, participants heard sentences carrying one of the contours and had to choose among four possible reactions chosen for their hypothetical link to the contour meanings (I get it; I've no idea; I guess you're right; No, really, it's true). The results show that L*L% was consistently associated with ''I get it'', confirming that A did not know proposition p before and signaling that p was added to the common ground, H*H% with ''I've no idea'', which rejects S's attribution to A of knowledge about p, and H+!H*H% with ''No, really, it's true'', which signals that A actually believes p while S does not. They give experimental support to the view that intonational meaning is dialogical.

It is now well documented for different varieties of English that the speech production and perception systems rapidly adapt to contextual social cues. This adaptation is sensitive not only to speaker social identity but also to implicit social cues, suggesting that the underlying mechanism is automatic rather than controlled. While it has recently been shown that the interpretation of intonation depends on segmental cues to sociolect within the same utterance, the present study explores whether it also depends on implicit contextual social cues. Starting from the observation that a specific type of intonational contour is used differently in Corsican French and Continental French, we tested whether Corsican French listeners interpret this contour differently depending on which dialectal region is evoked by a visual cue. The results are consistent with this hypothesis, thus providing evidence for implicit social adaption in a new domain of linguistic behavior, specifically, the prosody-meaning interface. We describe an exemplar-based model of our results demonstrating that such models can be readily extended to capture the effects found by the present study.