V6 N1 Paper 11
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Spring 2012

Language Analysis of Speakers with Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type  

Anthony Habash

Committee

Curry Guinn (chair)
Douglas Kline
Laurie Patterson

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.

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Recommended Citation: Habash, A., Guinn, C, Kline, D., Patterson, L. (2012) Language Analysis of Speakers with Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type . Annals of the Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington, 6(1) paper 11. http://csbapp.uncw.edu/data/mscsis/full.aspx.

V6 N1 Paper 11
Annals of the MS in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington
Spring 2012