Behavioural NeurologyAutomated profiling of spontaneous speech in primary progressive aphasia and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia: An approach based on usage-frequency
Section snippets
Background
In clinical practice, diagnosis and tracking of language in dementia, such as in primary progressive aphasias (PPA), commonly relies on a range of formal neuropsychological tests, such as picture naming or sentence-picture matching, as well as descriptions of spontaneous language output, e.g., as “non-fluent” or “jargon” (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011; Marshall et al., 2018). However, there is considerable interest in quantification of broader aspects of spontaneous speech, which in turn may
Methods
We report how we determined our sample size, all inclusion/exclusion criteria, whether inclusion/exclusion criteria were established prior to data analysis, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.
Group comparisons
Table 3 displays group averages and main effects for between-group comparisons with age entered as covariate. All independent variables yielded significant main effects in between-group comparisons. The biggest effect size was for combination ratio, followed by content word frequency, word count, content word ratio and collocation strength. Fig. 1 visualizes the language profiles of the dementia subtypes in relation to NCs.
For pairwise comparisons, we used Bonferroni adjustments of significance
Discussion
We ran an automated analysis of spontaneous language production in healthy speakers, canonical PPAs and bvFTD. Group comparisons showed significant differences between all dementia groups and healthy speakers as well as between each dementia subtype. In all dementia groups, there were correlations between language production variables and validated behavioral measures of disease progression. A machine learning classifier, using the output from the analysis, categorized samples with a success
Credit author statement
Vitor C. Zimmerer: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing Chris J.D. Hardy: Data curation, Formal analysis, Resources, Validation, Writing – original draft James Eastman: Data curation Sonali Dutta: Data curation Leo Varnet: Formal analysis Rebecca L. Bond: Data curation, Resources Lucy Russell: Data curation, Resources Jonathan D. Rohrer: Data
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Availability of data and materials
The conditions of our ethics approval, in particular those concerning patient confidentiality, do not permit public archiving of the original data. Access to anonymized data will be granted to named researchers following completion of a sharing agreement to cover the exchange of data and materials between the relevant institutions. Legal copyright restrictions prevent public archiving of the various assessment batteries and instruments. The FLAT is available here: https://osf.io/v8mg9/.
Funding
This study was funded by a McKesson UK and Alzheimer's Society's grant (grant AS-PG-16-004 [Rosemary Varley and Vitor Zimmerer]). The Dementia Research Centre is supported by Alzheimer's Research UK, Brain Research Trust, and The Wolfson Foundation. Individual authors were supported by an Action on Hearing Loss–Dunhill Medical Trust Pauline Ashley Fellowship (grant PA23_Hardy [Chris Hardy]), a Medical Research Council PhD Studentship (Rebecca Bond), a Medical Research Council Clinician
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Acknowledgments
We thank Michael Coleman for programming the FLAT.
References (56)
- et al.
Silent pauses in aphasia
Neuropsychologia
(2018) Comprehension of discourse-linked and non-discourse-linked questions by children and Broca's aphasics
Language and the Brain
(2000)- et al.
Non-verbal semantic impairment in semantic dementia
Neuropsychologia
(2000) Neurolinguistic analysis of recurrent utterance in aphasia
Cortex
(1982)- et al.
“Mini-mental state”. A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician
Journal of Psychiatric Research
(1975) - et al.
Automated classification of primary progressive aphasia subtypes from narrative speech transcripts
Cortex
(2014) - et al.
Syntactic frame and verb bias in aphasia: Plausibility judgments of undergoer-subject sentences
Brain and Cognition
(2003) Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2003)- et al.
Comprehension and acceptability judgments in agrammatism: Disruptuions in the syntax of referencial dependency
Brain and Language
(1993) - et al.
Beyond canonical form: Verb-frame frequency affects verb production and comprehension
Brain and Language
(2003)