Recently the paper “Prosody Analysis as a Tool for Differential Diagnosis of Cognitive Impairment” by School of Communication Science and Disorders professor Dr. Richard Morris and Florida State doctoral graduate and current Ohio University assistant professor Dr. Chorong Oh was published in Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (POMA) an editor-reviewed, open-access, online journal that provides a venue for current work in acoustics. 

“Emotional prosody includes the changes in pitch, loudness, and timing that we make in our speech in order to convey our feelings,” Dr. Morris explained. Dr. Morris’s and Dr. Oh’s research included analyzing a set of recordings made by people with three different types of dementia as well as age-matched people without cognitive issues. Through this research, they discovered that they were able to separate the four groups using acoustic measures. Dr. Morris explained that this finding indicates that different dementia types may be able to be identified without expensive or invasive techniques which is extremely valuable as the treatments for different dementia types can widely vary.

On the impact of the new publication in POMA, Dr. Morris shared, “My colleagues and I are proud to have our paper accepted in this publication. This platform will allow other acoustic scientists to see the work. They may use our model in their work and move our understanding of how to differentiate dementia types using speech. Any progress in this differentiation will be helpful for the people who have dementia and their loved ones.”