The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical 'pseudo-utterances' were presented to listener groups with and without PD in two separate rating tasks. Task I required participants to rate how confident a speaker sounded from their voice and Task 2 required listeners to rate how polite the speaker sounded for a comparable set of pseudo-utterances. The results showed that PD patients were significantly less able than HC participants to use prosodic cues to differentiate intended levels of speaker confidence in speech, although the patients could accurately detect the politelimpolite attitude of the speaker from prosody in most cases. Our data suggest that many PD patients fail to use vocal cues to effectively infer a speaker's emotions as well as certain attitudes in speech such as confidence, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in the meaningful processing of prosodic sequences in spoken language (Pell & Leonard, 2003).

中文翻译：

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从患有帕金森氏病的成年人的韵律中了解说话者的态度。

帕金森氏病可能会破坏在社交互动中解释声音（韵律）线索的能力，这对如何从语音中理解情感产生了显着影响。这项研究调查了患有情绪韵律缺陷的PD患者是否表现出进一步的困难，无法从韵律中解读说话者的态度。在两个单独的评估任务中，向有或没有PD的听众群体展示了语音变化但语义上无意义的“伪话语”。任务1要求参与者评估说话者从自己的声音中听到的自信程度，而任务2要求听众评估说话者在一组类似的伪言语发音中的礼貌程度。结果表明，尽管在大多数情况下，PD患者可以从韵律中准确地检测出说话者的礼貌态度，但PD患者使用韵律提示来区分说话者预期的语音置信水平的能力却明显低于HC参与者。我们的数据表明，许多PD患者无法使用声音提示来有效地推断出说话人的情绪以及讲话中的某些态度（例如信心），这与基底神经节在有意义地处理口语序列中的发音过程中所起的作用一致。 （Pell＆Leonard，2003年）。