Prosody is a non-verbal or suprasegmental feature of language that conveys various levels of information to the listener, including linguistic, affective (attitudinal and emotional), dialectical, and idiosyncratic data.1 The acoustical features underlying prosody include pitch, intonation, melody, cadence, loudness, timbre, tempo, stress, accent, and pauses.2 These acoustical features are typically spared in patients with cortical dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease in which temporoparietal cortices are primarily affected. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease, however, often develop apraxia, which can be defined as a disorder of skilled movement not caused by weakness, akinesia, deafferentation, abnormal tone or posture, movement disorders (such as tremor or chorea), intellectual deterioration, poor comprehension, or uncooperativeness.3Moreover, subtypes of apraxia have been delineated and are defined by the nature of errors made by the patient and the means by which these errors are elicited.4 5 Accordingly, a patient with probable dementia of the Alzheimer’s type is described who had normal prosodic elements to his spontaneous everyday speech, but could not produce the same acoustical features underlying prosody to command. The nature of his errors might constitute what can be termed “ideomotor prosodic apraxia.”

The patient was a 71 year old, retired physician …