TY - JOUR
T1 - Computerized assessment of syntactic complexity in Alzheimer's disease
T2 - A case study of Iris Murdoch's writing
AU - Pakhomov, Serguei V
AU - Chacon, Dustin A
AU - Wicklund, Mark
AU - Gundel, Jeanette K
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2012 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2011/3
Y1 - 2011/3
N2 - Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer's disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demonstrate the application of computational linguistic methods to automate the analysis of grammatical complexity. We implemented the Computerized Linguistic Analysis System (CLAS) based on the Stanford syntactic parser (Klein and Manning, Pattern Recognition, 38(9), 1407-1419, 2005) for longitudinal analysis of changes in syntactic complexity in language affected by neurodegenerative disorders. We manually validated CLAS scoring and used it to analyze writings of Iris Murdoch, a renowned Irish author diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. We found clear patterns of decline in grammatical complexity consistent with previous analyses of Murdoch's writing conducted by Garrard, Maloney, Hodges, and Patterson (Brain, 128(250-260, 2005). CLAS is a fully automated system that may be used to derive objective and reproducible measures of syntactic complexity in language production and can be particularly useful in longitudinal studies with large volumes of language samples.
AB - Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer's disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demonstrate the application of computational linguistic methods to automate the analysis of grammatical complexity. We implemented the Computerized Linguistic Analysis System (CLAS) based on the Stanford syntactic parser (Klein and Manning, Pattern Recognition, 38(9), 1407-1419, 2005) for longitudinal analysis of changes in syntactic complexity in language affected by neurodegenerative disorders. We manually validated CLAS scoring and used it to analyze writings of Iris Murdoch, a renowned Irish author diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. We found clear patterns of decline in grammatical complexity consistent with previous analyses of Murdoch's writing conducted by Garrard, Maloney, Hodges, and Patterson (Brain, 128(250-260, 2005). CLAS is a fully automated system that may be used to derive objective and reproducible measures of syntactic complexity in language production and can be particularly useful in longitudinal studies with large volumes of language samples.
KW - Computational linguistics
KW - Dementia
KW - Iris Murdoch
KW - Natural language processing
KW - Syntactic complexity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79953703404&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79953703404&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3758/s13428-010-0037-9
DO - 10.3758/s13428-010-0037-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 21287110
AN - SCOPUS:79953703404
SN - 1554-351X
VL - 43
SP - 136
EP - 144
JO - Behavior Research Methods
JF - Behavior Research Methods
IS - 1
ER -