Fifteen patients with prominent positive symptoms of schizophrenia and 15
normal controls performed verbal prosodic and pure musical discrimination
tasks, with changes in pitch and timing parameters. The patients'
performance was comparable to that of controls on the discrimination of
terminal pitch changes, but significantly poorer on the more difficult
internal pitch discrimination. The latter deficit was positively correlated
with the severity of their positive symptoms. The results suggest that
patients have a deficit in processing fundamental aspects of prosody, which
is associated with the presence of positive symptoms.