Could you please hand me that something? It’s over there, next to the something.
Many of us experience “lesologica,” or the inability to find words, in our daily lives, and this usually becomes more pronounced as we get older.
Not being able to find the right words could be a sign of changes in the brain consistent In the early stages (the “preclinical” stage) Alzheimer’s disease The disease is detected before more obvious symptoms appear.
but, Recent Research A University of Toronto study suggests that a more accurate indicator of brain health in older adults is the speed at which they speak, rather than their word-finding difficulty.
The researchers asked 125 healthy adults, aged between 18 and 90, to describe a scene in detail. These descriptions were then recorded and stored in a database. artificial intelligence (AI) software that extracts features such as speaking rate, length of pauses between words, and variety of words used.
Participants also underwent a battery of standard tests measuring their ability to concentrate, think quickly, and plan and carry out tasks. The age-related decline in these “executive” abilities correlated closely with the pace of everyday conversation, suggesting a more widespread decline than simply having trouble finding the right words.
What’s novel about this study is the use of a “picture-word interference task,” a clever task designed to separate the two steps in naming an object: finding the correct word and instructing your mouth how to pronounce it aloud.
In this task, participants were shown pictures of everyday objects (e.g., a broom) and were played audio clips of words that were either related in meaning (e.g., “mop,” making it harder to recall the name of the picture) or similar in sound (e.g., “groom,” making it easier to recall the name of the picture).
Interestingly, the study found that older adults’ natural speaking speed was related to how quickly they could name the pictures, highlighting that a global slowing of processing, rather than the specific task of verbal memory recall, may underlie broader cognitive and linguistic changes with age.
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How to make your findings more persuasive
Although the findings of this study are intriguing, word finding in response to picture-based cues may not reflect lexical complexity in unconstrained everyday conversation.
Verbal fluency tasks, in which participants must generate as many words as possible from a particular category (e.g., animals or fruits) or beginning with a particular letter within a time limit, can be used in conjunction with picture naming to better capture the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon.
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon refers to the temporary inability to retrieve a word from memory, despite partial recall and the feeling that you know the word.
These tasks are considered to be better tests of everyday speech than picture-word interference tasks because they involve active retrieval and production of words from one’s vocabulary, similar to the processes involved in natural speech.
Verbal fluency performance does not decline significantly with normal aging ( 2022 Survey), poor performance on these tasks may be indicative of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
The test is useful because it takes into account typical changes that occur in word retrieval abilities as we age, allowing doctors to identify impairments beyond those expected from normal aging and potentially detect neurodegenerative diseases.
Verbal fluency tests engage different brain regions involved in language, memory and executive function and can therefore provide insight into which areas of the brain are affected by cognitive decline.
The authors of the University of Toronto study could have also investigated participants’ subjective experience of word retrieval difficulty together with objective measures such as speech pauses, which would have provided a more comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes involved.
Personal reports of the “sensation” of struggling to recall words could provide valuable insights that complement behavioral data and lead to more powerful tools for quantifying and detecting early cognitive decline.
open the door
Still, this study shows that not only what you say, but how quickly you say it, can reveal cognitive changes, opening exciting doors for future research.
By utilizing natural language processing (a type of AI) – a technique that uses computational techniques to analyse and understand human language data – the study builds on previous research that has noticed subtle changes in the spoken and written language of prominent figures, such as: Ronald Reagan and Iris Murdoch A few years before he was diagnosed with dementia.
Whereas these opportunistic reports were based on looking back after a dementia diagnosis, this study offers a more systematic, data-driven, prospective approach.
By taking advantage of rapid advances in natural language processing, it becomes possible to automatically detect language changes such as a slowing of speaking rate.
This study highlights that changes in speech rate may be an important and subtle indicator of cognitive health and may help identify people at risk before more severe symptoms appear.
Claire LancasterLecturer, Dementia, University of Sussex and Alice StantonDoctoral Program, Dementia, University of Sussex
This article is reprinted from conversation Published under a Creative Commons license. Original Article.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2024.
