Anthony Habash
Language Analysis of Speakers with Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type
April 27, 2012
Committee
Dr. Curry Guinn(Chair)
Dr. Laurie Patterson
Dr. Douglas Kline
Public Announcement
Abstract
This research attempts a discriminative analysis of conversation dialogues involving individuals suffering from Dementia of Alzheimer’s Type. Several metric analyses are applied to the transcripts of the Carolina Conversation Corpus (Pope and Davis 2011) in order to determine if there are significant statistical differences between the averages of the individuals with and without Alzheimer’s disease. Results from the analysis indicate that Pronoun Rate, GoAhead Utterances, Syllables-Per-Minute, and Honore’s Statistic provide defensible means of differentiating the linguistic characteristics of spontaneous speech between healthy individuals and those with Alzheimer’s disease.
FULL TEXT (pdf)
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