Prosodic abnormalities in schizotypal personality disorder

Abstract

ObjectivePatients with schizophrenia speak with blunted vocal affect but little is known regarding the prosody of persons with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD). This work examined expressive prosody in SPD, its relationship to brain structure, and outlined a framework for measuring elements of prosody in clinical populations. MethodsTwenty-eight antipsychotic-naïve SPD subjects were matched with 27 healthy comparison (HC) subjects. Subjects read aloud short sentences and responded to probes to record both predetermined and self-generated speech samples. Samples were analyzed acoustically (pause proportion, duration, attack, and pitch variability) and subjectively by raters (amount of pauses, degree of emotion portrayed, and how much they wanted to hear more from the subjects) on paragraph, sentence, word, word-fragment, and syllable levels. Alexithymia and ability to self-monitor behavior were compared between groups. The pars opercularis was manually traced on structural MRI data. ResultsSPD subjects' speech had significantly more pauses, was slower, had less pitch variability, and expressed less emotion than HC subjects. Pitch variability correlated with socio-economic status achievement. There was no difference between groups in left or right pars opercularis volumes. A statistically significant correlation suggested that smaller left pars opercularis volumes in SPD subjects correlated with more pauses and less emotion. SPD subjects reported more alexithymia and difficulty self-monitoring their behavior compared with controls. In SPD subjects the high alexithymia correlated with raters not wanting to hear more from them and SPD subjects' inability to modulate their social behavior correlated with their having fewer friends. Thus, the SPD subjects exhibited insight. ConclusionsSPD subjects displayed significant prosodic deficits that were measurable in speech samples as brief as a word-fragment. The determinants of these deficits are not known although these may include a dysfunctional pars opercularis. These data add to the nascent literature describing social cognition deficits in SPD.