Computerized assessment of syntactic complexity in Alzheimer's disease: a case study of Iris Murdoch's writing.

Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer's disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demonstrate the application of computational linguistic methods to automate the analysis of grammatical complexity.