Lexical Diversity and Language Impairment

The development of artificial intelligence tools has seen an enormous growth recently. Linguistic artificial intelligence tools are being successfully applied in the field of speech analysis and discourse. In our study, we used automatic NLP tools to detect differences in picture description in the discourse of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and healthy people. A measure of lexical diversity was used to compare discourse complexity. Transcripts of recordings of the probands within the EWA project were used in the study. From the multiple comparisons, we found that there is a statistically significant difference between healthy people and people suffering from MCI and AD. Our results indicate that healthy people have more lexical diversity than people suffering from MCI and AD – a more diverse vocabulary in spontaneous speech, in our case, when describing a picture.