Voice Markers of Lexical Access in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

The results show a direct relationship between the different acoustic parameters present in AD and the verbal fluency tests results.

On the analysis of speech and disfluencies for automatic detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…Recent state-of-the art approaches include modeling by means of linear and nonlinear speech features [14,15]. The proposed approach is based on the integration of several types of optimum features to model speech and disfluencies, using both linear and nonlinear ones.…”

“…Furthermore, this proposal is based on the description of speech pathologies [5,12] with regard to articulation, phonation, quality of the speech, human perception, and the complex dynamics of the system. In this paper, some of the most used speech features (linear and nonlinear) will be taken into account for differentiation between pathological and healthy and speech [4,5,[12][13][14][15][16], and discrimination [11] through human perception. Most of them are well known in the field of pathological speech characterization, and therefore for each parameter, a reference is given where further information and a deeper description can be found.…”

Automatic speech analysis to early detect functional cognitive decline in elderly population

“…the variation of amplitudes of consecutive periods; (5) Percentage of voice breaks, estimated as the number of distances between consecutive pulses longer than 1.25 divided by the pitch floor (i.e. 70Hz) [9]; (6) Standard deviation of the third formant (F3), which refers to tones between 1.5kHz and 2.5kHz; (7) Speech rate, i.e. the number of syllables divided by the total speech time [16]; (8) Mean duration of the syllables [16]; (9) Mean duration of the inter-syllabic pauses >250ms [16]; (10) Percentage of the phonation time, i.e.…”

“…70Hz) [9]; (6) Standard deviation of the third formant (F3), which refers to tones between 1.5kHz and 2.5kHz; (7) Speech rate, i.e. the number of syllables divided by the total speech time [16]; (8) Mean duration of the syllables [16]; (9) Mean duration of the inter-syllabic pauses >250ms [16]; (10) Percentage of the phonation time, i.e. the intra-and intersyllabic nuclei time <250ms compared to the total speech time [16]; (1))Articulation rate, i.e.…”

“…Dementia significantly affects human speech and language both at linguistic and paralinguistic level [2]. In the early phase of dementia, temporal parameters of speech are altered: notably longer hesitation times and lower speech rates [3,4], increased number and decreased length of voice segments [5], increased number of word-finding pauses and higher percentage of voiceless segments [6][7][8][9]. Rhythm alterations have been highlighted also in terms of significantly less pitch modulation of people with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) compared to age-matched controls [10].…”