Automated Measures of Syntactic Complexity in Natural Speech Production: Older and Younger Adults as a Case Study.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

Multiple methods have been suggested for quantifying syntactic complexity in speech. We compared eight automated syntactic complexity metrics to determine which best captured verified syntactic differences between old and young adults.

Method

We used natural speech samples produced in a picture description task by younger (n = 76, ages 18-22 years) and older (n = 36, ages 53-89 years) healthy participants, manually transcribed and segmented into sentences. We manually verified that older participants produced fewer complex structures. We developed a metric of syntactic complexity using automatically extracted syntactic structures as features in a multidimensional metric. We compared our metric to seven other metrics: Yngve score, Frazier score, Frazier-

SUBMITTER: Agmon G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12510242 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature