Abstract
Background
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) for many individuals, is accompanied by widespread connected speech (CS) changes (e.g., shorter CS samples, mention of fewer semantic content units, lower syntactic complexity). Nevertheless, findings on CS in MCI are heterogeneous. This heterogeneity, combined with the heterogeneity in cognition in MCI suggests that there could exist more than one CS profile in this population.
Objective
We aimed to determine if there are multiple CS profiles in MCI and whether these potential CS profiles are characterized by distinct cognitive presentations.
Methods
CS characteristics were extracted from the samples of 109 controls and 210 individuals with MCI from the COMPASS-ND study database. A Two-Step Cluster Analysis was then carried out to identify potential CS profiles in MCI. These profiles were compared to one another and to controls in terms of their linguistic and cognitive characteristics.
Results
We identified two CS profiles in MCI, characterized by reduced syntactic complexity and semantic content and by dysfluencies, longer CS samples, and reduced semantic idea density and efficiency, respectively. The reduced semantic content/syntactic complexity profile was also characterized by various cognitive difficulties (e.g., visuospatial, episodic memory, executive functioning domains) in comparison with controls, whereas the increased production and reduced idea transmission effectiveness profile had relatively isolated episodic memory difficulties.
Conclusions
CS analysis could be a helpful screening tool to identify individuals with MCI who show greater cognitive difficulties and who would most benefit from more extensive cognitive and/or medical testing as well as from cognitive and/or psychological interventions.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
