Profiling spontaneous speech decline in Alzheimer's disease: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Cross-sectional comparisons indicated that mild-moderate AD patients produced more word-finding delays (WFDs) and empty and indefinite phrases, while producing fewer pictorial themes, repairing fewer errors, responding to fewer WFDs, produce shorter and less complex phrases and produce speech with less intonational contour than controls. However, the two groups could not be distinguished on the basis of phonological paraphasias. Longitudinal follow-up, however, suggested that phonological processing deteriorates over time, where the prevalence of phonological errors increased over 12 months. Discussion Consistent with findings from neuropsychological, neuropathological and neuroimaging studies, the language deterioration shown by the AD patients shows a pattern of impairment dominated by semantic errors, which is later joined by a disruption in the phonological aspects of speech.

Automatic speech analysis for the assessment of patients with predementia and Alzheimer's disease

“…Speech, as the main channel of human communication, has great potential to monitor people with dementia, because speech and language characteristics could represent behavioral markers of dementia variants [41]. The present study has demonstrated that speech processing technology could be a valuable supportive method for clinicians responding to the need for additional objective and automated tools to enable assessment of very early-stage dementia.…”

Diagnostic and Prognostic Role of Semantic Processing in Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease

“…Linguistic changes in verbal expression are present during preclinical AD. During the early stage of the disease, articulation and melodic line are not greatly affected, and the length and number of sentences are similar to the linguistic production observable in healthy individuals matched for age and education [56]. Later on, however, AD patients tend to produce fewer words in a given time, speak slower than controls, have higher numbers of stutters, produce fewer self-corrections and engage in incomplete conversations [54].…”

Connected Speech in Neurodegenerative Language Disorders: A Review

“…This result is not attested in the story narration task, where an underuse of person deictics is reported (March et al, 2006). People suffering from AD produce more high-frequency words as well as semantic and lexical errors (Kempler et al, 1987; Kavé and Levy, 2003), such as word finding difficulties (Croisile et al, 1996; Forbes-McKay and Venneri, 2005; Ash et al, 2007; de Lira et al, 2011; Forbes-McKay et al, 2013), indefinite terms (Nicholas et al, 1985; Feyereisen et al, 2007; Visch-Brink et al, 2009; Lai, 2014), revision (Forbes-McKay and Venneri, 2005; Forbes-McKay et al, 2013; Orimaye et al, 2014), repetitions (Nicholas et al, 1985; Visch-Brink et al, 2009; de Lira et al, 2011; Guinn and Habash, 2012; Sajjadi et al, 2012a; Orimaye et al, 2014; Drummond et al, 2015), and neologisms (Fraser et al, 2015a; Yancheva et al, 2015) than healthy persons.…”

“…Discourse in patients with AD is characterized by compromised coherence, with many of irrelevant and implausible details. A low efficiency and the failure in mentioning key concepts, namely mentioning fewer persons, objects, and actions than healthy persons (Bschor et al, 2001; Kavé and Levy, 2003; Ahmed et al, 2013a), leads to uninformative picture descriptions in these patients (Nicholas et al, 1985; Croisile et al, 1996; Shimada et al, 1998; Carlomagno et al, 2005; Cuetos et al, 2007; Feyereisen et al, 2007; Ahmed et al, 2013a,b; Forbes-McKay et al, 2013; Lai, 2014; Fraser et al, 2015a). …”