Do patients with schizophrenia use prosodic focus marking to attribute mental states in a conversation situation ?
Résumé
Many previous studies have established that individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) experienced deficits in social cognition including Theory of Mind (ToM) disorders (Brüne 2005, Green et al. 2008). Very few studies have investigated these impairments in schizophrenia during natural communication situations (McCabe et al. 2004, Champagne-Lavau et al. 2009). However, to fully characterize ToM ability in schizophrenia, we need to understand several components of this ability that specifically appear during social interactions. In the present study, we were interesting in focus marking as a linguistic marker of ToM. We know that speakers use prosody to encode the difference between the given/contrastive statuses (i.e. focus marking) of discourse referents in accordance with their beliefs about the hearers' knowledge state. Specifically, in French, the contrastive information shows a tendency to be produced in a separate prosodic phrase from the rest of the utterance. In this study we tested whether the prosodic encoding of contrast is altered in SZ speech during social interaction and whether this alteration reflects ToM impairment.