Perception of linguistic and emotional prosody in Parkinson's disease - evidence from Slovene (original) (raw)

The present study investigated the perception of emotional and linguistic prosodic functions in speakers of Slovene language affected by Parkinson's disease. Eight participants with a diagnosis of Idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD group) and eight elderly healthy controls (HC), matched for age and years of education, were tested using and identification and a discrimination task for emotional and linguistic prosody. The stimuli for linguistic prosody consisted of sentences uttered as a question or as a statement. The stimuli for emotional prosody consisted of sentences uttered in six different emotional tones: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and pleasant surprise. Compared to healthy control the overall performance of the PD group was lower in three out of four tasks: linguistic identification, linguistic discrimination, and emotional discrimination. Moreover, the PD group identified less accurately negative emotions, more specifically anger and sadness.