Automatic classification of AD pathology in FTD phenotypes using natural speech.

Introduction: Screening for Alzheimer's disease neuropathologic change (ADNC) in individuals with atypical presentations is challenging but essential for clinical management. We trained automatic speech-based classifiers to distinguish frontotemporal dementia (FTD) patients with ADNC from those with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD).

Methods: We trained automatic classifiers with 99 speech features from 1 minute speech samples of 179 participants (ADNC = 36, FTLD = 60, healthy controls [HC] = 89).

Automated Measures of Syntactic Complexity in Natural Speech Production: Older and Younger Adults as a Case Study.

Purpose: Multiple methods have been suggested for quantifying syntactic complexity in speech. We compared eight automated syntactic complexity metrics to determine which best captured verified syntactic differences between old and young adults.

Method: We used natural speech samples produced in a picture description task by younger ( = 76, ages 18-22 years) and older ( = 36, ages 53-89 years) healthy participants, manually transcribed and segmented into sentences.

Changes in Digital Speech Measures in Asymptomatic Carriers of Pathogenic Variants Associated With Frontotemporal Degeneration.

Background And Objectives: Clinical trials developing therapeutics for frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) focus on pathogenic variant carriers at preclinical stages. Objective, quantitative clinical assessment tools are needed to track stability and delayed disease onset. Natural speech can serve as an accessible, cost-effective assessment tool.

Prosodic characteristics of prepausal words produced by patients with neurodegenerative disease.

Prosody of patients with neurodegenerative disease is often impaired. We investigated changes to two prosodic cues in patients: the pitch contour and the duration of prepausal words. We analyzed recordings of picture descriptions produced by patients with neurodegenerative conditions that included either cognitive (n=223), motor (n=68), or mixed cognitive and motor impairments (n=109), and by healthy controls (n=28; HC).

Negative sentences exhibit a sustained effect in delayed verification tasks.

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect).

Attention to speech: mapping distributed and selective attention systems.

When faced with situations where many people talk at once, individuals can employ different listening strategies to deal with the cacophony of speech sounds and to achieve different goals. In this fMRI study, we investigated how the pattern of neural activity is affected by the type of attention applied to speech in a simulated "cocktail party." Specifically, we compared brain activation patterns when listeners "attended selectively" to only one speaker and ignored all others, versus when they "distributed their attention" and followed several concurrent speakers.

Negative polarity in quantifiers evokes greater activation in language-related regions compared to negative polarity in adjectives.

The processing of sentences with negative quantifiers (e.g., few) is more costly than of sentences that contain their positive counterparts (e.

Paying attention to speech: The role of working memory capacity and professional experience.

Managing attention in multispeaker environments is a challenging feat that is critical for human performance. However, why some people are better than others in allocating attention appropriately remains highly unknown. Here, we investigated the contribution of two factors-working memory capacity (WMC) and professional experience-to performance on two different types of attention task: selective attention to one speaker and distributed attention among multiple concurrent speakers.

Logical negation mapped onto the brain.

High-level cognitive capacities that serve communication, reasoning, and calculation are essential for finding our way in the world. But whether and to what extent these complex behaviors share the same neuronal substrate are still unresolved questions. The present study separated the aspects of logic from language and numerosity-mental faculties whose distinctness has been debated for centuries-and identified a new cytoarchitectonic area as correlate for an operation involving logical negation.

The processing of polar quantifiers, and numerosity perception.

We investigated the course of language processing in the context of a verification task that required numerical estimation and comparison. Participants listened to sentences with complex quantifiers that contrasted in Polarity, a logical property (e.g.