The way someone speaks may reveal more about their health and aging than previously thought, according to a new study using an automated computer tool called a “speech clock.” A person’s speaking age is not just a matter of vocal style; Researchers say this reflects what’s happening inside the body, and they hope it could provide a low-cost, non-invasive, automated alternative to measuring biological aging.
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“Our voice seems to contain a lot more information about aging than we previously thought,” said Agustín Ibáñez, lead author of the study at Trinity College Dublin.
An automated computer calculated a person’s speaking age and compared it to their actual birth age, revealing whether their speech sounds younger, average or older than expected, and offering clues about healthy aging.
“It captures both the passage of chronological time and signals from cognition, the brain, systems biology and even our accumulated social environment,” he added.
Researchers analyzed audio recordings of nearly 3,000 Spanish-speaking adults across Latin America. Participants completed a series of tasks, including narrating a short animated film, telling a story after a 20-minute interval, and naming items in given categories.
Using machine learning, the team looked at hundreds of features capturing how and what people speak, such as speech rate and pauses, pitch, emotional content, vocabulary and semantic accuracy, to estimate chronological age and generate an individual “speech age gap.”
What the “older” speech shows
The vocal clock distinguished healthy individuals from people with dementia. Healthy participants had the smallest speech age gaps, while increasingly wide gaps were seen in people with Alzheimer’s disease and forms of frontotemporal dementia.
People whose speech sounds older than expected for their chronological age have shown signs of accelerated aging in several biological and clinical systems. MRI brain scans indicated greater loss of brain structure and altered brain activity.
Older speech scores were also linked to higher levels of p-Tau217, a key protein in the blood linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
Participants with older speech scores performed worse on tests of memory, concentration, and problem solving. This link was present not only for language-related tasks, but also for non-verbal tasks like visual memory.
“The broader finding is nevertheless striking in that a person’s voice can provide a remarkably compact reading of the multiple dimensions of aging,” Ibáñez added.
Factors such as chronological age, brain aging, cognition, and Alzheimer’s disease and dementia phenotypes are traditionally measured with very different and often expensive tools, but they seem to be converging in the way we talk, he said.
The authors noted that many current measures of biological aging require MRI scans, blood samples, or specialized clinical assessments. On the other hand, “voice clock” offers an automated, inexpensive and non-invasive alternative, which can be carried out remotely on standard devices without specialized medical personnel.
The researchers emphasized, however, that the speech clock is not yet a diagnostic test for dementia and cannot determine whether an older-looking speech profile predicts who will later develop cognitive decline.
Gn Health
