July 23, 2001

This is interesting.  I've never heard of this clinical term (prosody) describing potential relationship between HD and inability to socially interact.
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ABSTRACT:
Comprehension of prosody in Huntington's disease 1990

Patients with Huntington's Disease (HD) who were without dementia
were compared to unilateral stroke patients and controls as previously
reported in 1983, to discover if they had a prosodic defect.

Subjects were presented tape-recorded speech filtered sentences and asked to indicate the tone of voice as happy, sad or angry (affective prosody), or as a question, command or statement (propositional prosody).

HD patients were impaired in comprehension of both types of prosody
compared to controls but were not different from stroke patients.

A second study compared early HD patients with at-risk siblings and
spouse controls on comprehension of affective and propositional
prosody, discrimination of both types of prosody, rhythm discrimination and tonal memory (Seashore tests).

HD patients were impaired in both comprehension and discrimination of
all types of prosody. HD patients were less accurate than at-risk patients on the tonal memory task but not on the rhythm discrimination task.

These findings suggest compromise in ability to understand the more subtle prosodic aspects of communication which may contribute to social impairment of HD patients very early in the course of the disease.

Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 1990, Vol 53, 607-610 Comprehension of prosody in Huntington's disease

LJ Speedie, N Brake, SE Folstein, D Bowers and KM Heilman
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore School of Medicine, Maryland

Source: JNNP OnLine