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Analysis of Prosodic Patterns in Conversational Speech in People with Alzheimer’s Disease
Cenk Demiroglu
Although Alzheimer’s disease causes progressive degradation in all cognitive functions of the
human brain, one of the most noticeable changes at the early phases of the disease is the
degradation in language abilities which reflects itself as progressively shrinking lexicon that is
used by the patient in his/her daily life. As the disease progresses to later stages, repetitive
speech patterns and monotone speaking style becomes more prominent. In this work, we
interviewed 17 Alzheimer’s patients that are at different phases of the disease. The interviews
are recorded for analysis of the prosodic patterns such as changes in pitch during voiced
speech, changes in energy, and duration of speech and silences. Those parameters are then
compared with the same parameters extracted from healthy adults during interview. Besides
the objective analysis, the interviews are also subjectively analysed to further understand the
repetitive patterns in speech and the divesity of the words used during the interview.