Speech differences between aged women with and without early Alzheimer's Disease: linguistic indicators of cognitive decline

Despite extensive research on language impairments of individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), little is known about whether women with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), an early stage of AD, differ in their language use from healthy controls. To address this gap, the present study investigates speech differences between 22 older women with early AD and 22 age- and education-matched controls with lexical-semantic and disfluency linguistic features, comparing their performance on the Cookie Theft picture description and Cinderella story retelling tasks from the Delaware corpus. Results reveal that, compared with the control group, women with early AD i) produced a smaller average number of tokens and types, with the differences in the Cinderella retelling task reaching statistical significance; ii) exhibited more pronouns and higher anomia values, with both features showing significant differences in recalling the Cinderella story; and iii) produced more disfluencies such as lexical fillers, repeats, and false starts, with a significant difference in lexical fillers in the Cinderella retelling task. These patterns suggest that complex language tasks prove to be more capable of revealing pre-existing cognitive changes in women with early AD, as manifested in their reduced lexical retrieval abilities, higher anomia levels, and increased speech disfluency compared to healthy controls. These findings provide empirical evidence of speech differences between aged women with and without early AD, underscoring the importance of linguistic analysis as a valuable tool in the early detection of AD-related language, memory, and cognitive impairments and timely intervention in the AD continuum.