Predicting Early Indicators of Cognitive Decline from Verbal Utterances

Padhee, Swati; Illendula, Anurag; Sadler, Megan; Shalin, Valerie L.; Banerjee, Tanvi; Thirunarayan, Krishnaprasad; Romine, William L.

doi:10.1109/bibm49941.2020.9313106

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Problems in verbal fluency seem to be related to a lower number of content words (nouns, modifiers) accompanied by more frequent use of pronouns, determiners, and light verbs [ 4 , 5 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ]. Together, these findings have given rise to the development of computational models predicting the presence or risk of AD on the basis of written or oral text production [ 6 , 10 , 11 , 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Improving the predictive power of these models and their applicability to different languages is a current and urgent task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…is reported for English-speaking AD patients [ 12 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ] and German-speaking AD patients [ 21 , 22 , 23 ] as well as for Italian-speaking AD patients [ 13 ]. Recent studies provide evidence that relevant changes are already present in preclinical and even prodromal stages of AD; see on English [ 10 , 15 , 24 ] and on German [ 5 , 23 , 25 ]. Though all these studies found significantly higher proportions of pronouns in the AD groups compared with healthy aging controls, the findings vary in strength and—specifically in the studies on German—in the affected types of pronouns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Changes in Pronoun Use a Decade before Clinical Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Dementia—Linguistic Contexts Suggest Problems in Perspective-Taking

2022

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The use of pronouns has been shown to change pathologically in the early phases of Alzheimer’s Dementia (AD). So far, the findings have been of a quantitative nature. Little is known, however, about the developmental path of the change, its onset, the domains in which it initially occurs, and if and how it spreads to other linguistic domains. The present study investigates pronoun use in six speakers of German a decade before they were clinically diagnosed with AD (LAD) and six biographically matched healthy controls (CTR). The data originate from monologic spoken language elicited by semi-spontaneous biographical interviews. Investigation of nine pronoun types revealed group differences in the use of three pronoun types: D-pronouns—a specific pronoun type of German for reference to persons and objects; the impersonal pronoun man ‘one’, and the propositional pronoun das ‘this/that’. Investigation of the linguistic contexts in which these three pronoun types were used revealed a correlation with declines in elaborative and evaluative information; that is, information the hearer would benefit from in creating an informed model of the discourse. We, therefore, hypothesize that the early changes in language use due to AD point to problems in perspective-taking, specifically in taking the hearer’s perspective.

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