Neuropsychological Test Validation of Speech Markers of Cognitive Impairment in the Framingham Cognitive Aging Cohort

Exploration of Medicine · 2021

Authors#

Larry Zhang*, Anthony Ngo*, Jason A. Thomas, Hannah A. Burkhardt, Carolyn M. Parsey, Rhoda Au, Reza Hosseini Ghomi

* co-first authors

DOI

Abstract#

Although clinicians primarily diagnose dementia based on a combination of metrics such as medical history and formal neuropsychological tests, recent work using linguistic analysis of narrative speech to identify dementia has shown promising results. We aim to build upon research by demonstrating the predictive capability of linguistic analysis in differentiating cognitively normal from cognitively impaired participants and comparing the performance of the original linguistic features with the performance of expanded features. Data were derived from a subset of the FHS Cognitive Aging Cohort. We analyzed a sub-selection of 98 participants, which provided 127 unique audio files and clinical observations. We built on previous work which extracted original linguistic features from transcribed audio files by extracting expanded features including syntactic, semantic, and lexical information.