An Automated Approach to Examining Pausing in the Speech of People With Dementia

Dementia is a common neurodegenerative condition involving the deterioration of cognitive and communication skills. Pausing in the speech of people with dementia is a dysfluency that may be used to signal conversational trouble in social interaction. This study aimed to examine the speech-pausing profile within picture description samples from people with dementia and healthy controls (HCs) within the DementiaBank database using the Calpy computational speech processing toolkit. Sixty English-speaking participants between the ages of 53 and 88 years (Mage = 67.43, SD = 8.33; 42 females) were included in the study: 20 participants with mild cognitive impairment, 20 participants with moderate cognitive impairment, and 20 HCs. Quantitative analysis shows a progressive increase in the duration of pausing between HCs, the mild dementia group, and the moderate dementia group, respectively.

[1]  F. Goldman-Eisler.  Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech , 1968 .

[2]  E. Kaplan,et al.  The assessment of aphasia and related disorders , 1972 .

[3]  I. T. Draper.  THE ASSESSMENT OF APHASIA AND RELATED DISORDERS , 1973 .

[4]  S. Folstein,et al.  "Mini-mental state". A practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. , 1975, Journal of psychiatric research.

[5]  Dirk-Jan Povel,et al.  The effect of correcting temporal structure on the intelligibility of deaf speech , 1984, Speech Commun..

[6]  G. Jefferson.  Preliminary notes on a possible metric which provides for a 'standard maximum' silence of approximately one second in conversation. , 1989 .

[7]  R. Schulz,et al.  Coping with specific stressors in Alzheimer's disease caregiving. , 1993, The Gerontologist.

[8]  J. Becker,et al.  The natural history of Alzheimer's disease. Description of study cohort and accuracy of diagnosis. , 1994, Archives of neurology.

[9]  F. Minifie,et al.  Effects of temporal alterations on speech intelligibility in parkinsonian dysarthria. , 1994, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[10]  Brigitte Zellner,et al.  Pauses and the temporal structure of speech , 1995 .

[11]  K. Yorkston,et al.  Speech and pause characteristics following speech rate reduction in hypokinetic dysarthria. , 1996, Journal of communication disorders.

[12]  D. Talkin.  Fundamentals of Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition , 1996 .

[13]  A. Whitworth,et al.  Conversing in dementia: A conversation analytic approach , 1998, Journal of Neurolinguistics.

[14]  L. Mansur,et al.  Language and Communication Disorders in Dementia of the Alzheimer Type , 1998 .

[15]  Sameer Singh,et al.  Evaluation of an objective technique for analysing temporal variables in DAT spontaneous speech , 2001 .

[16]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking , 2002, Cognition.

[17]  L. Burgio,et al.  Effects of a communication intervention on the discourse of nursing home residents with dementia and their nursing assistants , 2002 .

[18]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat: doing phonetics by computer , 2003 .

[19]  L. Mansur,et al.  Descriptive discourse: topic familiarity and disfluencies. , 2004, Journal of communication disorders.

[20]  M. Weiner.  Commentary on “Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease: Two decades of progress.” Central role of technology in the treatment and prevention of Alzheimer's disease , 2005, Alzheimer's & Dementia.

[21]  W. Alexander.  American psychiatric association. , 2008, P & T : a peer-reviewed journal for formulary management.

[22]  Kirill Sakhnov,et al.  Dynamical Energy-Based Speech/Silence Detector for Speech Enhancement Applications , 2009 .

[23]  Boyd H. Davis,et al.  Examining Pauses in Alzheimer's Discourse , 2009, American journal of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.

[24]  Cristina D. Dye,et al.  Temporal parameters of spontaneous speech in Alzheimer's disease , 2010, International journal of speech-language pathology.

[25]  M. Barkat-Defradas,et al.  Syntactic and lexical context of pauses and hesitations in the discourse of Alzheimer patients and healthy elderly subjects , 2011, Clinical linguistics & phonetics.

[26]  M. Grossman,et al.  The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder , 2011, Brain and Language.

[27]  Janet Wiles,et al.  Conceptual Recurrence Plots: Revealing Patterns in Human Discourse , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[28]  Janet Wiles,et al.  Human Communication as Coupled Time Series: Quantifying Multi-Participant Recurrence , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.

[29]  Andrew E. Smith,et al.  Visualising conversations between care home staff and residents with dementia , 2013, Ageing and Society.

[30]  Yiannis Kompatsiaris,et al.  Evaluation of speech-based protocol for detection of early-stage dementia , 2013, INTERSPEECH.

[31]  B. Miller,et al.  Machine learning approaches to diagnosis and laterality effects in semantic dementia discourse , 2014, Cortex.

[32]  Frank Rudzicz,et al.  Automatically identifying trouble-indicating speech behaviors in alzheimer's disease , 2014, ASSETS.

[33]  Janet Wiles,et al.  An Automated Approach to Examining Conversational Dynamics between People with Dementia and Their Carers , 2015, PloS one.

[34]  V. Manera,et al.  Automatic speech analysis for the assessment of patients with predementia and Alzheimer's disease , 2015, Alzheimer's & dementia.

[35]  J. Pariente,et al.  Pauses During Autobiographical Discourse Reflect Episodic Memory Processes in Early Alzheimer’s Disease , 2015, Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD.

[36]  Jordan R. Green,et al.  Profiling Speech and Pausing in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) , 2016, PloS one.

[37]  Frank Rudzicz,et al.  Identifying and Avoiding Confusion in Dialogue with People with Alzheimer’s Disease , 2017, CL.

[38]  Janet Wiles,et al.  PauseCode: Computational Conversation Timing Analysis , 2018, MA3HMI@ICMI.

[39]  PauseCode , 2018, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Multimodal Analyses Enabling Artificial Agents in Human-Machine Interaction.

[40]  J. Pariente,et al.  What happens when nothing happens? An investigation of pauses as a compensatory mechanism in early Alzheimer's disease , 2019, Neuropsychologia.