Automatic identification of Mild Cognitive Impairment through the analysis of Italian spontaneous speech productions

This paper presents some preliminary results of the OPLON project. It aimed at identifying early linguistic symptoms of cognitive decline in the elderly. This pilot study was conducted on a corpus composed of spontaneous speech sample collected from 39 subjects, who underwent a neuropsychological screening for visuo-spatial abilities, memory, language, executive functions and attention. A rich set of linguistic features was extracted from the digitalised utterances (at phonetic, suprasegmental, lexical, morphological and syntactic levels) and the statistical significance in pinpointing the pathological process was measured. Our results show remarkable trends for what concerns both the linguistic traits selection and the automatic classifiers building.