A symptom of cognitive decline discovered in language

Word finding difficulty (WFD) is a common cognitive disorder in aging.
This manifests itself both in natural language and in controlled laboratory tests.
It is precisely from here that the University of Toronto's research began, which discovered that the symptoms for recognizing cognitive decline exist in language.
It is not so much the forgetting of words, as one might believe, but rather the speed with which the processes of recognizing and formulating the word are elaborated.
It can also be called “failure in the retrieval of word forms”.
To arrive at the speed hypothesis, the researchers selected 125 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 85.
These had to perform a series of tasks, such as recognizing objects on the screen, even in the presence of sound interference.
The conclusion of the study suggested that processing speed is a key factor and that verbal reaction time may be an important clinical measure.
read also A new deadly disease spreads in Japan, scientists are perplexed Hypothesis to measure cognitive decline: processing speed theory One of the best-known theories linked to cognitive decline sees the decrease in processing speed with advancing age.
The slowdown is more evident and compromising when failure occurs due to the absence of simultaneity or within a limited time.
However, in the past it has been observed that age-related slowing is stronger in non-lexical tasks than in lexical tasks.
There are indeed some certainties in this specific field of research: older adults are significantly slower than younger people in completing various cognitive tasks, including word production tasks such as naming pictures, answering questions or reading written words; older adults also tend to produce more disfluencies such as filled and empty pauses (e.g., “uh” and “um”) between speech; older adults have a generally slower speech rate.
Difficulties in finding words are not always age-related, but the slowdown that occurs in completing tasks is to be understood as a general slowdown in the activation of processes, including the mental subprocesses required for word retrieval.
read also This famous bottled water contains bacteria and contaminants How the speed of recovery theory can help in the preventive diagnosis of cognitive decline The verbal fluency test involves various regions of the brain related to language, memory and executive functioning.
Therefore it can offer information on which regions of the brain are affected by cognitive decline.
However, this study offers interesting insights for future research rather than arriving at a clear conclusion.
Indeed, researchers have shown that it is not just what we say, but also the speed with which we say it, that reveals cognitive changes.
Compared to reading signs after a dementia diagnosis, the study provides an approach that suggests symptoms for early diagnosis.
Being able to automatically detect – for example through the use of natural language processing technology (a type of artificial intelligence applied in medicine) – the slowing down of speech speed could define an indicator for cognitive health and help identify people at risk.