Study: Slight change in speech before dementia occurs

A study conducted by the University of Toronto in Canada found that those who could not quickly express what they were looking at in pictures were more likely to say the wrong word.

To test whether difficulty finding words was really an accurate indicator of brain health in older adults, the University of Toronto researchers looked at 125 healthy adults.

The patients were divided into three groups: young, middle-aged, and elderly.

The average age of the young participants was 26, the average age of the middle-aged was 48, and the average age of the elderly was 70. The first stage involved a “picture-word interference task.” The researchers showed the participants pictures of everyday objects, for example, a picture of a broom while playing an audio clip of a related word like “mop” — or a word that looked like it.

Researchers found that older adults who naturally spoke faster were faster at correctly naming pictures, suggesting that slower language processing could be a sign of cognitive decline rather than difficulty remembering words. While this may seem obvious, people’s communication patterns change as they get older, and sometimes there’s nothing to worry about.

For example, struggling to find words is something that comes with age. Older adults also show subtle changes in their speech, such as speaking more slowly, pausing between words, and a lack of variety in the words they use.

The researchers warned that struggling to identify the same word from memory, sometimes called the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, along with these changes in speech, could be a precursor to conditions such as dementia.

“This study highlights the potential of speech rate changes as an important and accurate marker of cognitive health that could help identify people at risk before more severe symptoms develop,” Claire Lancaster and Alice Stanton, dementia researchers at the University of Sussex who were not involved in the research, wrote to The Conversation. The new study, they added, “opens exciting doors for future research, as it shows that it’s not just what a person says that matters, but how quickly they say it, and that slower speech can reveal cognitive changes.”