Empirically derived “discourse phenotypes” are associated with neuropsychological performance, cognitive status, and global atrophy: A latent profile analysis of connected speech measures

Evidence suggests that “connected speech” (i.e., spoken language, as in discourse) is related to early cognitive decline and early Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), yet performance on speech tasks and cognitive performance in ADRD are notably heterogeneous. Here we examined whether unique spoken language phenotypes could be ascertained using latent profile analysis (LPA), and we examined the association of identified clusters to demographic, clinical and cognitive characteristics. In the subsets with amyloid PET and structural MR, we analyzed cluster associations with estimated amyloid DVR and/or global atrophy at or near the speech sample.