The effects of education and reading and writing habits on automatic assessment of narrative recall in typical aging and in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

We analyzed oral discourse production to identify the characteristics of language performance in healthy and pathological aging. Most studies have focused on performance in tasks eliciting discourse production through visual stimuli or interviews. Very little is known about the impact of aging-related factors on narrative recall, a complex task that requires comprehension of a narrative to reproduce it. In the present thesis, we address these issues in two studies. In the first study – Automatic Assessment of Syntactic, Lexical and Semantic Aspects of Narrative Recall in Alzheimer’s Disease –, we compared a group of participants diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) with that of a healthy elderly control group in syntactic, lexical and semantic aspects in a narrative recall task. To obtain the scores for the features related to these three aspects, we used a software that automatically analyzes linguistic features from discourse samples. Results indicate that features from all three aspects distinguish elderly adults diagnosed with AD from elderly adults with unimpaired cognition. The second study – Education and Reading and Writing Habits as Predictors of Narrative Recall Performance in Healthy Aging: a Study with Automatic Assessment – aimed at investigating the impact of education and reading and writing habits on recalls produced by healthy elderly adults. We adopted the same automatic analysis of Study 1. Results show that education influences performance on syntactic, lexical and semantic aspects of narrative recall. This stresses the importance of education as a source of cognitive reserve for linguistic performance in the elderly. Reading and writing habits did not influence performance in any of the features analyzed. Both studies suggest that the analysis of discourse production can be useful for the detection of changes in linguistic processing. The results from these two studies also indicate that task typology and group characteristics (such as the presence of cognitive impairment or low educational level) must be taken into consideration when investigating specific features of oral discourse production.