Linguistic Features Identify Alzheimer’s Disease in Narrative Speech

Although memory impairment is the main symptom of Alzheimer's disease (AD), language impairment can be an important marker. Relatively few studies of language in AD quantify the impairments in connected speech using computational techniques.

We aim to demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy in automatically identifying Alzheimer's disease from short narrative samples elicited with a picture description task, and to uncover the salient linguistic factors with a statistical factor analysis.