Silence and Aging. A Correlation between Pauses and Dementia

A large body of research highlights both an increased frequency of and a consistent trend for longer silent pauses in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). It has been shown that such phenomena mostly contribute to lexical retrieval within that condition. In the present paper, we analyze disfluencies in the spoken production of elderly Italian patients with and without AD with the aim of illustrating the correlation between Alzheimer’s Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and both the duration and collocation of Silent Pauses (SP). We hold the view that identifying a detectable parameter of AD would help diagnosis by making it noninvasive, inexpensive and easier. This research’s main finding is that the observation of acoustic parameters’ such as SP duration and Speech Rate could effectively help mild AD diagnosis. In conclusion, it became clear that SP longer than 1 second should be particularly addressed.