A characterization of the prosodic loss in Parkinson's disease.

Prosodic contours in the verbal output of 30 patients with Idiopathic Parkinson's disease were contrasted to those of fifteen age-, sex-, and educationally matched normal subjects. All subjects were tested for language disorder, dementia, depression, and the comprehension of linguistic prosody. The striking disorder of prosody in Parkinson's disease relates to motor control, not to a loss of the linguistic knowledge required to make prosodic distinctions. It appears that prosody, language and the motor planning of speech are integrated at a basal ganglia level.