Changes in the Rhythm of Speech Difference between People with Nondegenerative Mild Cognitive Impairment and with Preclinical Dementia

Abstract

This study explores several speech parameters related to mild cognitive impairment, as well as those that might be flagging the presence of an underlying neurodegenerative process. Speech is an excellent biomarker because it is not invasive and, what is more, its analysis is rapid and economical. Our aim has been to ascertain whether the typical speech patterns of people with Alzheimer’s disease are also present during the disorder’s preclinical stages. To do so, we shall be using a task that involves reading out aloud. This is followed by an analysis of the recordings, looking for the possible parameters differentiating between those older people with MCI and a high probability of developing dementia and those with MCI that will not do so. We found that the disease’s most differentiating parameters prior to its onset involve changes in speech duration and an alteration in rhythm rate and intensity. These parameters seem to be related to the first difficulties in lexical access among older people with AD.

Using a Discourse Task to Explore Semantic Ability in Persons With Cognitive Impairment

“…The analysis of disfluencies revealed the largest differences between the groups, and we found that the healthy controls tended to use fewer silent pauses, shorter maximum pause lengths and fewer disfluencies in total compared to the cognitively impaired groups. This result is in line with previous research showing that disfluencies are more common in discourse produced by persons with early MCI (Mueller et al, 2018 ) and in persons with a clinical diagnosis of MCI (Fleming, 2014 ; Szatloczki et al, 2015 ; Meilán et al, 2020 ).…”

“…In that sense it should be noted that disfluencies are not solely indicative of word finding difficulties: individual differences may be related to verbal intelligence and working memory for example (Engelhardt et al, 2019 ). Persons with MCI tend to produce longer hesitations (Szatloczki et al, 2015 ), more pauses (Meilán et al, 2020 ) and have a lower speech rate (Szatloczki et al, 2015 ; Meilán et al, 2020 ). Although it is often concluded that disfluencies are early signs of cognitive decline, Mueller et al ( 2016 ) found no difference in disfluencies between participants judged as having preclinical (early) MCI and participants who were cognitively healthy.…”

Ten Years of Research on Automatic Voice and Speech Analysis of People With Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Systematic Review Article

“…Nevertheless, Beltrami et al ( 2018 ) have found features that characterize different types of MCI, with differences between amnestic MCI and multidomain MCI in rhythmic features such as the pairwise variability index, and especially in acoustic features such as the duration of silence and speech segments, phonation rate, pause rate, and spectral centroid. In a recent study, Meilán et al ( 2020 ) have sought to find two different profiles within people with MCI and hypothesized that several features differentiate between people that will develop AD and people that will not deteriorate further.…”

Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Its Clinical Application in the Field of Neuroscience: Advances and Future Directions

“…MCI is an etiologically heterogenous entity and about 15-20% of patients with MCI go on to develop clinical Alzheimer disease (AD) (Jessen et al, 2010). Neuropsychological testing has been the main biomarker used to distinguish patients with MCI, who eventually develop AD, from those with MCI who do not (Mueller et al, 2018;Meilan et al, 2020). Like other non-invasive neuroimaging modalities, fNIRS has been explored as a potential biomarker to differentiate MCI and AD (Hong and Yaqub, 2019).…”