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May 28, 2026Alzheimer s & Dementia Diagnosis Assessment & Disease Monitoring0 citationsOpen Access

Automated analysis of expressive prosody in Dutch patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia

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LJLize C. JiskootOAOlaiya AroLBLiset de Boer

Key Points

  • The research aims to examine expressive prosody in Dutch patients with frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia to see if previous findings hold true across languages.
  • Analyzed semi-structured speech samples from patients with behavioral variant FTD (17), primary progressive aphasia (74), and controls (45).
  • Assessed group differences, classification abilities, and correlations with neuropsychological tests and gray matter volume.
  • Patients with non-fluent variant PPA showed narrowest f0 range and shortest speech duration.
  • f0 range effectively distinguished patients with reduced prosody (nfvPPA/bvFTD) from those with preserved prosody (semantic/logopenic variant PPA).
  • Lower f0 range correlated with reduced fluency and frontotemporal atrophy.

Abstract

Abstract BACKGROUND Previous studies have demonstrated impaired expressive prosody in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), but have been conducted in English‐speaking cohorts. To examine whether findings generalize across languages, we replicated prior work in Dutch patients. METHODS We examined expressive prosodic features in semi‐structured speech samples from patients with behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD; n = 17), primary progressive aphasia (PPA; n = 74) and controls ( n = 45). We assessed group differences, classification abilities, and associations with neuropsychological tests and gray matter volume. RESULTS Patients with non‐fluent variant PPA (nfvPPA) showed the narrowest f0 range and shortest speech duration. f0 range separated patients with reduced prosody (nfvPPA/bvFTD) from those with relatively preserved prosody (semantic variant PPA/logopenic variant PPA). Lower f0 range correlated with reduced fluency and frontotemporal atrophy. DISCUSSION Viewing expressive prosody as a multidimensional system helps explain why FTD syndromes become dysprosodic in different ways and highlights its diagnostic relevance. Future studies with larger patient samples in less canonical subtypes are needed to replicate and extend our findings.

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Cite This Study

Jiskoot et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a17dd923fad632b0f9da4bbhttps://doi.org/10.1002/dad2.70346
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