Linguistic screening tools for early identification of cognitive frailty

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of the OPLON project, co-funded by the Ministry of Education as part of the contract “Smart Cities and Communities and Social Innovation”. It aimed at identifying early linguistic symptoms of cognitive decline in the elderly. This pilot study was conducted on a corpus composed of spontaneous speech sample collected from 20 subjects, who underwent a neuropsychological screening for visuo-spatial abilities, memory, language, executive functions and attention. A rich set of linguistic features was extracted from the digitalized utterances (at phonetic, suprasegmental, lexical, morphological and syntactic levels) and the statistical significance in pinpointing the pathological process was measured. Our results, far from being complete, show remarkable trends for what concerns both the linguistic traits selection and the automatic classifiers building.