Lexical and Acoustic Speech Features Relating to Alzheimer Disease Pathology
Sunghye Cho, Katheryn A Q Cousins, Sanjana Shellikeri, Sharon Ash, David J. Irwin, Mark Liberman, Murray Grossman, Naomi Nevler
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: We compared digital speech and language features of patients with amnestic Alzheimer disease (aAD) or logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) in a biologically confirmed cohort and related these features to neuropsychiatric test scores and CSF analytes. METHODS: We included patients with aAD or lvPPA with CSF (phosphorylated tau ([p-tau]/β-amyloid [Aβ] ≥0.09, and total tau/Aβ ≥0.34) or autopsy confirmation of AD pathology and age-matched healthy controls (HC) recruited at the Frontotemporal Degeneration Center of the University of Pennsylvania for a cross-sectional study. We extracted speech and language variables with automated lexical and acoustic pipelines from participants' oral picture descriptions. We compared the groups and correlated distinct features with clinical ratings and CSF p-tau levels. RESULTS: = 0.026) were correlated with patients' CSF p-tau levels. DISCUSSION: Our measures captured language and speech differences between the 2 phenotypes that traditional language-based clinical assessments failed to identify. This work demonstrates the potential of natural speech in reflecting underlying variants with AD pathology.