Predicting Cognitive Impairment in Cerebrovascular Disease Using Spoken Discourse Production

Abstract

Purpose: Dementia due to cerebrovascular disease (CVD) is common. Detecting early cognitive decline in CVD is critical because addressing risk factors may slow or prevent dementia. This study used a multidomain discourse analysis approach to determine the spoken language signature of CVD-related cognitive impairment. Method: Spoken language and neuropsychological assessment data were collected prospectively from 157 participants with CVD as part of the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative, a longitudinal, observational study of neurodegenerative disease. Participants were categorized as impaired (n = 92) or cognitively normal for age (n = 65) based on neuropsychology criteria. Spoken language samples were transcribed orthographically and annotated for 13 discourse features, across five domains. Discriminant function analyses were used to determine a minimum set of discourse variables, and their estimated weights, for maximizing diagnostic group separation. Results: The optimal discriminant function that included 10 of 13 discourse measures correctly classified 78.3% of original cases (69.4% cross-validated cases) with a sensitivity of 77.2% and specificity of 80.0%. Conclusion: Spoken discourse appears to be a sensitive measure for detecting cognitive impairment in CVD with measures of productivity, information content, and information efficiency heavily weighted in the final algorithm.

Morphosyntactic aspects of agrammatism in Palestinian Arabic: Findings from a Semitic language

“…Agrammatism is a multi-dimensional deficit, often associated with Broca's aphasia, involving syntactic, morphological, and semantic factors of language production (Gilmore et al, 2019;Idrissi et al, 2021). One main feature of this deficit is grammatical simplification represented in the omission and/or substitution of grammatical morphemes, whether in spontaneous speech or constrained tasks (Yarbay, Kurada, & Aydın, 2020;Darshan & Goswami, 2020;Roberts et al, 2021). Bound grammatical morphemes, such as noun and verb inflections, were most likely substituted compared to omissions of free grammatical morphemes, such as determiners and conjunctions (Klopfenstein, Bernard, & Heyman, 2020).…”