Linguistic tests offer crucial insights into brain health. Assessments of speech and language functions are critical for diagnosing neurodegenerative aphasia syndromes and for characterizing, phenotyping, and monitoring other conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease dementia and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. Recently, the clinical potential of language analysis has been bolstered by computerized tools, which reveal subtle markers in natural speech via objective, automated, low-cost tests.
However, this potential is not being exploited evenly across the world. Out of the roughly 7000 languages in existence, less than 1% have received any systematic attention from researchers. Moreover, most studies are conducted in English, a language that is spoken by only 15% of persons worldwide. Importantly, findings obtained in English speakers cannot be assumed to hold for other populations, since each language may have a specific neurological organization and present different alterations following brain damage. Unless we want language testing to become a new source of brain health inequities, strategic global efforts need to be pursued.
Such is the motivation behind the International Network for Cross-Linguistic Research on Brain Health (Include), supported by the Alzheimer’s Association, the Global Brain Health Institute, and the Alzheimer’s Society. Include seeks to promote globally fairer approaches to brain health through novel research involving diverse languages. The network spans over 40 sites in roughly 30 countries across five continents. We bring together leading researchers from different disciplines to identify which linguistic difficulties in particular diseases are similar across languages and which ones may be found specifically in certain languages.
