The MBT A and B in Spanish and Catalan showed similar outcomes and can be considered equivalent. Moreover, the thorough methodology presented here for the transcultural adaptation and equivalence study, could serve as a model for future adaptations of the MBT and other verbal tests.

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This study contributes with reference data for the MBT providing the necessary adjustments for sociodemographic characteristics. Our data may prove to be useful for detecting asymptomatic at-risk candidates for secondary prevention studies of AD.

Background: Pause duration analysis is a common feature in the study of discourse in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and may also be helpful for its early detection. However, studies involving patients at the preclinical stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) have yielded varying results.Objectives: To characterize the probability density distribution of speech pause duration in AD, two multi-domain amnestic MCI patients (with memory encoding deficits, a-mdMCI-E, and only with retrieval impairment, a-mdMCI-R) and healthy control groups (HC) and to check if there are significant differences between them. To discuss the potential of those findings in clinical practice.Method: 112 picture-based oral narratives were manually transcribed and annotated for the automatic extraction of pause durations and their subsequent logconversion. We consider different probability distributions to fit speech pause duration truncating shorter ranges taking into account latest statistical findings to avoid inherent methodological uncertainties present in them.Results: Lognormal distribution (LND) explains the distribution of pause duration in speech for all groups, and its fitted parameters (µ,σ ) followed a gradation from the group with shorter durations and a higher tendency to produce short pauses (HC) to the group with longer pause durations and a considerably higher tendency to produce long pauses with more variance (AD). Importantly, a-mdMCI-E produced significantly longer pauses with greater variability than their a-mdMCI-R counterparts (α = 0.05) across all groups of study. Conclusion:We characterize and report significant differences at group level in the speech pause distribution across all groups of study that could be used to design tools and experiments for early prediction of AD progression.

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