The number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), a progressive and terminal kind of dementia, continues to rise with an estimated 14 million Americans affected by 2050. Prior to an AD diagnosis, many individuals are diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and have similar, but less severe, symptoms as those with AD. A common…

The cultural and linguistic diversity of our nation continues to grow and the skills needed by speech-language pathologists to address the needs of their existing caseload continue to be vast. According to the ASHA (2016) Schools Survey, only 8% of speech-language pathologists (n=1689) reported feeling very qualified to address cultural and…

There has been vast and growing amount of healthcare data especially with the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) as a result of the HITECH act of 2009. It is estimated that around 80% of the clinical information resides in the unstructured narrative of an EHR. Recently, natural language processing (NLP) techniques have offered…

Domain adaptation of natural language processing systems is challenging because it requires human expertise. While manual effort is effective in creating a high quality knowledge base, it is expensive and time consuming. Clinical text adds another layer of complexity to the task due to privacy and confidentiality restrictions that hinder the…

This study focuses on a meaningful understanding of idiosyncratic language in psychosis. The psychotic neologisms examined in this dissertation challenge the listener's accurate understanding. Idiosyncratic aspects of speech in psychosis are largely researched from a diagnostic perspective in the literature. This study asks how individuals…

Agrammatism is a frequent sequela of Broca's aphasia that manifests itself in omission and/or substitution of the grammatical morphemes in spontaneous and constrained speech. The hierarchical structure of syntactic trees has been proposed as an account for difficulty across grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, agreement, and negation). Supporting…