Cognitive and Structural Correlates of Conversational Speech Timing in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild-to-Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease - Relevance for Early Detection Approaches

Cognitive and Structural Correlates of Conversational Speech Timing in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild-to-Moderate Alzheimer’s Disease: Relevance for Early Detection Approaches

• Background

The present study examines whether the temporal characteristics of speech in a collaborative referencing task are associated with cognitive function and the volumes of brain regions involved in speech production and known to be reduced in MCI and AD pathology.

• Method
• Results
• Conclusion

Introduction

Speech and language impairments are indeed salient characteristics of MCI and early AD link

However, the cognitive and structural underpinnings of these speech-based measures in classification approaches have not been systematically investigated and are not fully established. link

Deficits in the lexical, semantic, executive, discourse and pragmatic domains of language are commonly observed in MCI and early AD link

AD speech is characterized by slower speech rate (global speed of speech including pauses), a higher number of silent pauses, longer pauses and shorter interpausal units (or chunks of speech bounded by silent pauses link

• Expectations

• Participants

• Neuropsychological Tests

• Speech Annotation and Measure Extraction

The pause threshold used in the automatic procedure was set at 100 ms to ensure its distinction with silent plosives link

The significance level was set at α = 0.006 link

Classification used cgplibrary

our exploratory analyses showed moderate accuracy rates for the speech-based classifiers in the pairwise contrasts link

Limitations

Abbreviations — might have been more useful earlier