BibTeX

@inProceedings{kokkinakis-etal-2019-multifaceted-278217,
	title        = {A Multifaceted Corpus for the Study of Cognitive Decline in a Swedish Population},
	abstract     = {A potential, early-stage diagnostic marker for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, is the onset of language disturbances which is often characterized by subtle word-finding difficulties, impaired spontaneous speech, slight speech hesitancy, object naming difficulties and phonemic errors. Connected speech provides valuable information in a non-invasive and easy-to-assess way for determining aspects of the severity of language impairment. Data elicitation is an established method of obtaining highly constrained samples of connected speech that allows us to study the intricate interactions between various linguistic levels and cognition. In the paper, we describe the collection and content of a corpus consisting of spontaneous Swedish speech from individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), with Subjective Cognitive Impairment SCI) and healthy, age-matched controls (HC). The subjects were pooled across homogeneous subgroups for age and education, a sub-cohort from the Gothenburg-MCI study. The corpus consists of high quality audio recordings (including transcriptions) of several tasks, namely:
(i)	a picture description task – the Cookie-theft picture, an ecologically valid approximation to spontaneous discourse that has been widely used to elicitate speech from speakers with different types of language and communication disorders; 
(ii)	a read aloud task (including registration of eye movements) – where participants read a text from the IREST collection twice, both on a computer screen (while eye movements are registered), and the same text on paper;
(iii)	a complex planning task – a subset of executive functioning that tests the ability to identify, organize and carry out (complex) steps and elements that are required to achieve a goal;
(iv)	a map task – a spontaneous speech production/semi-structured conversation in which the participants are encouraged to talk about a predefined, cooperative task-oriented topic;
(v)	a semantic verbal fluency task – category animals: where participants have to produce as many words as possible from a category in a given time (60 seconds). The fluency tests require an elaborate retrieval of words from conceptual (semantic) and lexical (phonetic) memory involving specific areas of the brain in a restricted timeframe. 
All samples are produced by Swedish speakers after obtaining written consent approved by the local ethics committee. Tasks (i) and (ii) have been collected twice in a diachronically apart period of 18 months between 2016 and 2018.
The corpus represents an approximation to speech in a natural setting: The material for elicitation is controlled in the sense that the speakers are given specific tasks to talk about, and they do so in front of a microphone. The corpus may serve as a basis for many linguistic and/or speech technological investigations and has being already used for various investigations of language features.},
	booktitle    = {CLARe4 : Corpora for Language and Aging Research, 27 February – 1 March 2019, Helsinki, Finland},
	author       = {Kokkinakis, Dimitrios and Lundholm Fors, Kristina and Fraser, Kathleen and Eckerström, Marie and Horn, Greta and Themistocleous, Charalambos},
	year         = {2019},
}