Comprehension of prosody in Parkinson's disease

The evidence for a receptive prosodic loss in Parkinson's disease (PD) has remained inconclusive since the first reports in the early 1980s (Scott, Ca ird and Williams, 1984). The present study examined three aspects of compre hension in 11 PD patients and a group of age matched controls. Experiment 1 found no evidence of deficits in phonological discrimination or lexical ac cess in the PD patients. Experiment 2 found that one patient (EA) was signi ficantly impaired on a test of lexical stress discrimination. Experiment 3 examined the discrimination, comprehension and identification of utterance prosody. This experiment found that overall the PD patients were significan tly impaired at the identification of utterance prosody. Patient TB was sig nificantly worse than controls on the identification and comprehension of u tterance prosody. The study has shown that PD patients can exhibit impairme nts in the comprehension of prosody and lexical stress. The evidence sugges ts that only some patients are impaired and the pattern of deficits can dif fer significantly.