Pakhomov Serguei V S, Marino Susan E, Birnbaum Angela K
Center for Clinical and Cognitive Neuropharmacology, 7-125F Weaver Densford Hall, 308 Harvard St. SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55406 USA.
Comput Speech Lang. 2013 Jan;27(1):116-134. doi: 10.1016/j.csl.2012.04.002. Epub 2012 May 8.
We present the results of a study investigating the use of speech and language characteristics extracted from spontaneous spoken discourse to assess changes in cognitive function. Specifically, we investigated the use of automatic speech recognition technology to characterize spontaneous speech disfluency induced by topiramate, an anti-epileptic medication with language-related side-effects. We audio recorded spontaneous speech samples from 20 participants during several picture description tasks and analyzed the recordings automatically and manually to extract a range of spoken fluency measurements including speech discontinuities (e.g., filled pauses, false starts, and repetitions), silent pause duration, speaking rate and vowel lengthening. Our results indicate that some of these paralinguistic speech characteristics are a) sensitive to the effects of topiramate, b) are associated with topiramate concentrations in the blood, and c) complement standard neuropsychological tests typically used to investigate cognitive effects of medications. This work demonstrates the use of computational linguistic tools to assess cognitive effects in a more sensitive, objective and reproducible manner than is currently available with standard tests.
我们展示了一项研究的结果，该研究调查了从自发口语话语中提取的语音和语言特征用于评估认知功能变化的情况。具体而言，我们研究了使用自动语音识别技术来表征由托吡酯引起的自发言语不流畅，托吡酯是一种具有与语言相关副作用的抗癫痫药物。我们在几个图片描述任务期间对20名参与者的自发语音样本进行了录音，并自动和手动分析录音，以提取一系列口语流利度测量指标，包括言语间断（如填充停顿、错误起始和重复）、沉默停顿持续时间、语速和元音延长。我们的结果表明，这些副语言语音特征中的一些具有以下特点：a）对托吡酯的作用敏感；b）与血液中的托吡酯浓度相关；c）补充了通常用于研究药物认知作用的标准神经心理学测试。这项工作证明了使用计算语言学工具以比目前标准测试更敏感、客观和可重复的方式评估认知作用。
