Do patients with schizophrenia use prosody to encode contrastive discourse status?

Abstract

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.

How Does the Absence of Shared Knowledge Between Interlocutors Affect the Production of French Prosodic Forms?

“…To do so, in the not-shared knowledge condition, target items appeared in black boxes and participants knew that they could have different shape/colour for objects in those boxes while in the shared knowledge condition, items appeared in white boxes and participants knew that it meant that their interlocutor shared the same objects as him/her. Second, in order to induce phonological prosodic variations, we manipulated the informational status of the second fragment since contrastive status of words is well known to lead to differences in AP phrasing [12,13,14]. To do so, we manipulated whether the noun or the adjective in the 2 nd fragment was the same or contrasted with the noun or the adjective in the 1 st fragment.…”

“…Pre-boundary lengthening and the presence of a typical fundamental frequency (f0) rise aligned with the last syllable of the AP are well known as the two main correlates of AP right boundaries [15,16,17,18]. For this reason, we considered that an AP right boundary was actually produced by the speaker after the target noun if (i) the f0 maximum hertz value of the last syllable of the target noun was at least 10% higher than that of the preceding low inflection point in the f0 curve and if (ii) the duration of the last syllable of the target noun was at least 10% longer than that the preceding syllable (see [14] for this procedure).…”

“…Among its pragmatic functions, abstract prosodic forms encode informational status of words. For instance, in French, new contrastive information tends to be phrased in a separate abstract prosodic unit (the accentual phrase or AP) while already mentioned information tends to be produced together with adjacent words [12,13,14]. In an interactive paradigm in which a director had to indicate noun-adjective pairs of items to an addressee, Michelas et al [14] showed that participants parsed the target noun in the same AP when it was identical to the noun in the preceding fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron followed by [BONBONS violets] AP ) while they parsed it in a separate AP when it contrasted with it to warn their interlocutor that this noun constituted a contrastive entity (e.g.,…”

Focus Marking and Prosodic Boundary Strength in French

“…Finally, the clearest consensus across studies on focus and prosodic features in French is that prosodic phrasing, i.e., the grouping of words into melodic/rhythmic phonological units of different sizes, is one of the main strategies employed by French speakers to mark the difference between given and contrastive elements. Specifically, a number of studies have reported a tendency for a narrow-focused constituent to be parsed in a separate AP (Beyssade et al, 2009;Chen & Destruel, 2010;Dohen & Loevenbruck, 2004;Féry, 2001;Michelas et al, 2014). In operational terms, if two elements would typically be grouped into a single AP in a nonfocused context, then in case one of them is focused, a prosodic restructuring process isolates that element in a separate AP.…”

Accent shifts in spoken noun phrases affect verification latencies of listeners in Dutch but not Canadian French

“…However, they produced the element that contrasted with a previously mispronounced element in a separate AP when they knew that the prompt conveyed false-belief about this element (e.g., [Les loups]AP [suivaient]AP [Mariloup]AP when "Mariloup" was mispronounced). As a consequence, when Mariloup was contrastive, an additional pitch accent was produced in the last syllable of "suivait" to isolate the noun from the preceding verb (see also Michelas et al, 2014). Rephrasing may also occur due to stress clash resolution, as described by Post (2011).…”