ArticleJournal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR2024
Automated Measures of Syntactic Complexity in Natural Speech Production: Older and Younger Adults as a Case Study.
Article in Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- MEG state dynamics of sentence generation: evidence for a compensatory segmentation mechanism in healthy aging.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Developing digital health technologies for frontotemporal degeneration.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Review
- Challenges and Methods in Annotating Natural Speech for Neurolinguistic Research.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Coordinating Words and Sentences: Detecting Age-Related Changes in Language Production.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2024Article
- Syntactic flexibility and lexical encoding in aging sentence production: an eye tracking study.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Detecting CSF-validated Alzheimer's disease from spontaneous speech in German: an interpretable end-to-end machine-learning framework.Frontiers in neurologyArticle
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeMultiple 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.
methodWe used natural speech samples produced in a picture description task by younger (
resultsOur multidimensional metric was successful in predicting age group (area under the curve [AUC] = 0.87), and it performed better than the other metrics. High AUCs were also achieved by the Yngve score (0.84) and sentence length (0.84). However, in a fully automated pipeline with ASR, the performance of these two metrics dropped (to 0.73 and 0.46, respectively), while the performance of the multidimensional metric remained relatively high (0.81).
conclusionsSyntactic complexity in spontaneous speech can be quantified by directly assessing syntactic structures and considering them in a multivariable manner. It can be derived automatically, saving considerable time and effort compared to manually analyzing large-scale corpora, while maintaining high face validity and robustness. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.24964179.
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