测试管理员行为会影响阿尔茨海默病语言特征,可能误导诊断结果。
"Is There Anything Else?'': Examining Administrator Influence on Linguistic Features from the Cookie Theft Picture Description Cognitive Test
- 通过对比不同管理员的饼干盗窃图片描述数据,分析其影响
- 管理员参与度显著改变患者语言特征,影响分类结果
- 提示需标准化测试流程,避免人为偏差干扰临床评估
阿尔茨海默病(AD)是一种进行性神经退行性疾病,会损害患者的认知能力。以往研究显示,自然语言样本中的变化可用于早期筛查AD。然而,语言缺陷常需测试管理员使用多种言语诱发技巧,以获取足够数量的命题性语句,这可能导致未被充分研究的“观察者效应”。本研究利用两个英文语料库——在不同地点由不同管理员采集的“饼干盗窃”图片描述数据,考察管理员参与程度对语言特征的影响。结果表明,管理员参与度显著影响患者言语中的语言特征。这些发现提示,下游分类任务中许多显著的语言特征可能部分源于测试实施方式的差异,而非仅由参与者认知状态决定。管理员行为的差异可能造成语言数据中的系统性偏差,从而混淆研究结果与临床评估。本研究强调,在构建负责任的临床语音分析框架时,亟需更标准化的测试实施协议。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that negatively impacts patients' cognitive ability. Previous studies have demonstrated that changes in naturalistic language samples can be useful for early screening of AD dementia. However, the nature of language deficits often requires test administrators to use various speech elicitation techniques during spontaneous language assessments to obtain enough propositional utterances from dementia patients. This could lead to the ``observer's effect'' on the downstream analysis that has not been fully investigated. Our study seeks to quantify the influence of test administrators on linguistic features in dementia assessment with two English corpora the ``Cookie Theft'' picture description datasets collected at different locations and test administrators show different levels of administrator involvement. Our results show that the level of test administrator involvement significantly impacts observed linguistic features in patient speech. These results suggest that many of significant linguistic features in the downstream classification task may be partially attributable to differences in the test administration practices rather than solely to participants' cognitive status. The variations in test administrator behavior can lead to systematic biases in linguistic data, potentially confounding research outcomes and clinical assessments. Our study suggests that there is a need for a more standardized test administration protocol in the development of responsible clinical speech analytics frameworks.
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