ensory Contributions to Impaired Prosodic rocessing in Schizophrenia avid

ackground: Deficits in affect recognition are prominent features of schizophrenia. Within the auditory domain, patients show ifficulty in interpreting vocal emotional cues based on intonation (prosody). The relationship of these symptoms to deficits in basic ensory processing has not been previously evaluated. ethods: Forty-three patients and 34 healthy comparison subjects were tested on two affective prosody measures: voice emotion dentification and voice emotion discrimination. Basic auditory sensory processing was measured using a tone-matching paradigm nd the Distorted Tunes Test (DTT). A subset of subjects was also tested on facial affect identification and discrimination tasks. esults: Patients showed significantly impaired performance on all emotion processing tasks. Within the patient group, a principal omponents analysis demonstrated significant intercorrelations between basic pitch perception and affective prosodic performance. In ontrast, facial affect recognition deficits represented a distinct second component. Prosodic affect measures correlated significantly ith severity of negative symptoms and impaired global outcome. onclusions: These results demonstrate significant relationships between basic auditory processing deficits and impaired receptive rosody in schizophrenia. The separate loading of auditory and visual affective recognition measures suggests that within-modality actors may be more significant than cross-modality factors in the etiology of affect recognition deficits in schizophrenia.