Automatically Detecting Errors and Disfluencies in Read Speech to Predict Cognitive Impairment in People with Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a central nervous system disorder that causes motor impairment. Recent studies have found that people with PD also often suffer from cognitive impairment (CI). While a large body of work has shown that speech can be used to predict motor symptom severity in people with PD, much less has focused on cognitive symptom severity. Existing work has investigated if acoustic features, derived from speech, can be used to detect CI in people with PD. However, these acoustic features are general and are not targeted toward capturing CI. Speech errors and disfluencies provide additional insight into CI. In this study, we focus on read speech, which offers a controlled template from which we can detect errors and disfluencies, and we analyze how errors and disfluencies vary with CI. The novelty of this work is an automated pipeline, including transcription and error and disfluency detection, capable of predicting CI in people with PD. This will enable efficient analyses of how cognition modulates speech for people with PD, leading to scalable speech assessments of CI.