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Episodic Thinking in Alzheimer's Disease Through the Lens of Language: Linguistic Analysis and Transformer-Based Classification.
- Source :
- American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology; Jan2024, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p87-95, 9p
- Publication Year :
- 2024
-
Abstract
- Purpose: Episodic memory decline is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and linked to deficits in episodic thinking directed to the future. We addressed the question whether a deficit in episodic thinking can be picked up directly from connected speech and its detection can be automatized. Method: We linguistically classified 2,809 utterances (including embedded clauses in the utterances) from picture descriptions from 70 healthy older controls, 82 people with mild probable AD (pAD), and 46 people with moderate pAD for whether they were episodic, nonepisodic, or "other" (e.g., off-task). Generalized linear regression models were used to investigate how ratios of these categories change in AD, controlling for age, gender, and education. Finally, we applied deep learning technique to explore the feasibility of automating the episodicity analysis. Results: Decline in episodicity significantly distinguished controls from both mild pAD and moderate pAD. Correlation analysis suggested this decline not to be an effect of age, gender, and education but of cognitive ability. The decline was not compensated by an increase of nonepisodic utterances but mainly of off-task expressions. A transformer-based classifier to explore the possibility of automatizing the classification of episodicity achieved a macro F1 score of 0.913 in the ternary classification. Conclusion: These results show that a loss of episodicity is an early effect in AD that is manifested in spontaneous speech and can be reliably measured by both humans and machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- THOUGHT & thinking
STATISTICS
ALZHEIMER'S disease
LINGUISTICS
LANGUAGE & languages
ARTIFICIAL intelligence
REGRESSION analysis
SEVERITY of illness index
INTER-observer reliability
EPISODIC memory
RESEARCH funding
SOUND recordings
CHI-squared test
QUESTIONNAIRES
DATA analysis software
DATA analysis
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 10580360
- Volume :
- 33
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 174676393
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1044/2023_AJSLP-23-00066