Natural speech markers of neurodegeneration: An interdisciplinary approach for disease discrimination and symptom tracking

In this project, we will perform the first cross-methodological validation of natural speech markers (NSMs) across dementia patients (AD, PD, and bvFTD). Specifically, we seek to establish their (a) nosological sensitivity (by identifying the optimal NSMs to discriminate among conditions and track symptom severity), (b) neural correlates (by detecting their putative MRI, fMRI, and EEG signatures), and (c) relative robustness (by gauging the classification accuracy and feature importance of NSMs vis-à-vis clinical/cognitive/linguistic (CCL).