Conversational turn-taking in frontotemporal dementia and related disorders

Introduction There is an urgent need to efficiently screen for neurocognitive disorders (NCDs). Early detection can significantly influence therapeutic approaches, patient management and overall quality of life. Spontaneous speech may offer rapid, easy and cost-effective screening measures for NCDs. While prior research has primarily focused on picture description tasks, social interaction is especially cognitively demanding and may offer measures unique to interpersonal conversation. Smooth turn-taking requires high temporal coordination between participants despite the complexity of language and paralanguage during turns, and may serve as a marker of disrupted executive functioning, linguistic ability or social motivation. The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) involves diminished executive function, non-verbal interpretation and social drive. We also investigated other FTLD (Frontotemporal lobar degeneration) -related disorders, including semantic, non-fluent and logopenic variants of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA, nfvPPA, lvPPA), corticobasal syndrome (CBS), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), the right temporal variant of FTD and...
Source: Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry - Category: Neurosurgery Authors: Tags: PostScript Source Type: research