Prosody and schizophrenia. Objective acoustic measurements of monotonous and flat intonation in young Danish people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. A pilot study

PurposePatients with schizophrenia have a flat and monotonous intonation. The purpose of the study was to find the variables of flat speech that differed in patients from those in healthy controls in Danish.Materials and methodsWe compared drug-naive schizophrenic patients 5 men, 13 women and 18 controls, aged 18-35 years, which had all grown up in Copenhagen speaking modern Danish standard (rigsdansk). We used two different tasks that lay different demands on the speaker to elicit spontaneous speech: a retelling of a film clip and telling a story from pictures in a book. A linguist used the computer program Praat to extract the phonetic linguistic parameters.ResultsWe found different results for the two elicitation tasks (Task 1: a retelling of a film clip, task 2: telling a story from pictures in a book). There was higher intensity variation in task one in controls and higher pitch variation in task two in controls. We found a difference in intensity with higher intensity variation in the stresses in the controls in task one and fewer syllables between each stress in the controls. We also found higher F1 variation in task one and two in the patient group and higher F2 variation in the control group in both tasks.ConclusionsThe results varied between patients and controls, but the demands also made a difference. Further research is needed to elucidate the possibilities of acoustic measures in diagnostics or linguistic treatment related to schizophrenia.