The study, published in the journal Science Advances, describes a “speech clock” that estimates a person’s chronological age from hundreds of acoustic and linguistic characteristics of their speech. The difference between a person’s actual age and their speech-predicted age (called the speech age gap) was also associated with multiple independent markers of biological aging, brain health, cognition, social adversity and dementia.
The study analyzed 2,928 Spanish-speaking participants from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, including healthy adults and people with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease and different forms of frontotemporal dementia.