The language of people with Alzheimer's disease includes significantly more indefinite words and repetitions than the language of healthy people of similar age and level of education.
So, an English professor at the University of Toronto, Ian Lancashire, analyzed the writing of British mystery writer Agatha Christie.
Previously, the works of British novelist Iris Murdoch were analyzed for signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that was confirmed after her death. Science Blog reported in 2004 that "while the structure and grammar of Murdoch's writing remained roughly consistent throughout her career, her vocabulary had dwindled and her language simplified in her very last novel."
Christie was never diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She continued to write in her final years, though some people believed she suffered from dementia.
Lancashire says her 73rd book, "Elephants Can Remember" is universally dismissed by critics as being full of errors and poorly plotted. The main character is a female novelist who struggles with memory loss while trying to solve a crime that happened in the past.
The professor told National Public Radio that when he read the book, he felt Christie was sensing what was happening to her, and that she kept writing "struck me as heroic."
His study involved feeding the text of 16 of her novels into a computer program that analyzed the vocabulary for the frequency of different words and the number of different words in each novel. "The richness of the vocabulary of Christie’s novels declines with her age at composition. The three novels that she wrote in her 80s, (Nemesis, Elephants, and Postern of Fate,) have a smaller vocabulary than any of the analyzed works written by her between ages 28 to 63," he writes.
Christie was 81 when she wrote the Elephants novel. Her use spiked of what Lancashire called indefinite words--"thing," "anything," "something," "nothing." At the same time, the number of different words Christie used dropped by 20 percent. "That is astounding," Lancashire told NPR. "That is one-fifth of her vocabulary lost."
Most of us don't have large collections of writing done over the course of our lives. But Lancashire points out in his conclusion that "this will begin to change as more individuals begin to keep, if only by inertia, a lifetime archive of e-mail, blogs, professional documents, and the like.
"While the diversity of topics and genres in such an archive brings methodological problems to the analysis ... we can nonetheless foresee the possibility of automated textual analysis as a part of the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and similar dementias."
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