# Speech Clock

Ibáñez and colleagues report in Science Advances a 'speech clock': they recorded 2,928 Spanish speakers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru across various speech tasks, used machine learning to extract more than 700 speech features that change with ageing and dementia (such as pitch and vocabulary range), trained a model to predict age and compute a 'speech age gap', and found the clock could distinguish healthy individuals from those with some form of cognitive impairment, rating the speech of people with cognitive issues as older than expected for their chronological age while healthy people's speech generally matched their age.

Ibáñez and colleagues report in Science Advances a 'speech clock': they recorded 2,928 Spanish speakers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru across various speech tasks, used machine learning to extract more than 700 speech features that change with ageing and dementia (such as pitch and vocabulary range), trained a model to predict age and compute a 'speech age gap', and found the clock could distinguish healthy individuals from those with some form of cognitive impairment, rating the speech of people with cognitive issues as older than expected for their chronological age while healthy people's speech generally matched their age.