言語学者が高齢者の自然な発話から認知症の初期徴候を検出する画期的な発見(NUS linguists make breakthrough discovery on detecting early linguistic signs of dementia by studying the natural speech of seniors)

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2024-06-11 シンガポール国立大学(NUS)

シンガポール国立大学(NUS)の言語学者チームは、自然な会話から認知症の初期兆候を検出できることを発見しました。この研究では、健康な高齢者と軽度認知障害(MCI)を持つ高齢者の自然な話し言葉を比較し、記憶関連のMCIを持つ人は話す量が少なく、抽象名詞を多く使うことが判明しました。これらの特徴はアルツハイマー病患者にも見られるパターンです。研究は、267,310語のデータを分析し、記憶関連MCIの人々がより抽象的な名詞を使用し、イメージ化能力に問題があることを示しました。この研究は、認知症の早期診断と介入に役立つ非侵襲的で費用対効果の高い方法として注目されています。

<関連情報>

認知症高齢者の自然な発話から、具体性効果の逆転を発見 Reversal of the concreteness effect can be detected in the natural speech of older adults with amnestic, but not non-amnestic, mild cognitive impairment

Luwen Cao, Kunmei Han, Li Lin, Jiawen Hing, Vincent Ooi, Nick Huang, Junhong Yu, Ted Kheng Siang Ng, Lei Feng, Rathi Mahendran, Ee Heok Kua, Zhiming Bao
Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring  Published: 18 April 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/dad2.12588

言語学者が高齢者の自然な発話から認知症の初期徴候を検出する画期的な発見(NUS linguists make breakthrough discovery on detecting early linguistic signs of dementia by studying the natural speech of seniors)

Abstract

INTRODUCTION
Patients with Alzheimer’s disease present with difficulty in lexical retrieval and reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns. Little is known about the phenomena before the onset of symptoms. We anticipate early linguistic signs in the speech of people who suffer from amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Here, we report the results of a corpus-linguistic approach to the early detection of cognitive impairment.

METHODS
One hundred forty-eight English-speaking Singaporeans provided natural speech data, on topics of their choice; 74 were diagnosed with single-domain MCI (38 amnestic, 36 non-amnestic), 74 cognitively healthy. The recordings yield 267,310 words, which are tagged for parts of speech. We calculate the per-minute word counts and concreteness scores of all tagged words, nouns, and verbs in the dataset.

RESULTS
Compared to controls, subjects with amnestic MCI produce fewer but more abstract nouns. Verbs are not affected.

DISCUSSION
Slower retrieval of nouns and the reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns are manifested in natural speech and can be detected early through corpus-based analysis.

Highlights

  • Reversal of the concreteness effect is manifested in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and semantic dementia.
  • The paper reports a corpus-based analysis of natural speech by people with amnestic and non-amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and cognitively healthy controls.
  • People with amnestic MCI produce fewer and more abstract nouns than people with non-amnestic MCI and healthy controls. Verbs appear to be unaffected.
  • The imageability problem can be detected in natural everyday speech by people with amnestic MCI, which carries a higher risk of conversion to AD.
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