Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40336266›Full record

ArticleJournal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD2025

Artificial intelligence-driven natural language processing for identifying linguistic patterns in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment: A study of lexical, syntactic, and cohesive features of speech through picture description tasks.

Cynthia A Nyongesa, Mike Hogarth, Judy Pa

Abstract read
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Article in Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

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0cells of the map it votes in
2citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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2 · The registry

The trial behind it

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Cynthia A NyongesaAlzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS), Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-1331-4864
Mike HogarthDivision of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-4264-1258
Judy PaAlzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS), Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-5788-9352

Funding

TREATMENT OF DEPRESSION IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASEP50AG005133 · NIA · UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH · PI SWEET, ROBERT A · 1985 to 2019
$43.0M
RHDBank Database DevelopmentR01DC008524 · NIDCD · CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY · PI BRIAN MACWHINNEY · 2007 to 2026
$7.0M
NIA NIH HHS P50 AG005133NIDCD NIH HHS R01 DC008524
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

BackgroundLanguage deficits often occur early in the neurodegenerative process, yet traditional methods frequently fail to detect subtle changes. Natural language processing (NLP) offers a novel approach to identifying linguistic patterns associated with cognitive impairment.ObjectiveWe aimed to analyze linguistic features that differentiate cognitively unimpaired (CU), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD) groups.MethodsData was extracted from picture description tasks performed by 336 participants in the DementiaBank datasets. 53 linguistic features aggregated into 4 categories: lexical, structural, syntactic, and discourse domains, were identified using NLP toolkits. With normal diagnostic cutoffs, cognitive function was evaluated with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).ResultsWith age and education as covariates, ANOVA and post-hoc Tukey's HSD tests revealed that linguistic features such as pronoun usage, syntactic complexity, and lexical sophistication showed significant differences between CU, MCI, and AD groups (p < 0.05). Notably, past tense and personal references were higher in AD than both CU and MCI (p < 0.001), while pronoun usage differed between AD and CU (p < 0.0001). Correlations indicated that higher pronoun rates and lower syntactic complexity were associated with lower MMSE scores and although some features like conjunctions and determiners approached significance, they lacked consistent differentiation.ConclusionsWith the growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-based scribing, these results emphasize the potential of targeted linguistic analysis as a digital biomarker to enable continuous screening for cognitive impairment.

Indexed as

Alzheimer DiseaseArtificial IntelligenceCognitive DysfunctionLinguisticsNatural Language ProcessingSpeechAgedAged, 80 and overFemaleHumansMaleMental Status and Dementia TestsMiddle AgedNeuropsychological TestsAlzheimer's diseasecognitive dysfunctiondementia detectiondigital biomarkersearly interventionlinguisticsmild cognitive impairmentnatural language processingpronounssyntactic complexity

Identifiers

PMID40336266
PMCPMC12231876

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.