The way you speak could reveal early signs of brain ageing
The way someone speaks can reveal more about their health and ageing than previously thought, a new study using an automated computer tool called a "speech clock" found. A person's speech age isn't just about...
The way someone speaks can reveal more about their health and ageing than previously thought, a new study using an automated computer tool called a "speech clock" found. A person's speech age isn't just about vocal style; researchers say it reflects what is happening inside the body, and they hope this could be a low-cost, non-invasive, automated alternative for measuring biological ageing.
“Our voice appears to contain much more information about aging than we previously recognised,” said Agustín Ibáñez, senior author of the study at Trinity College Dublin.
An automated computer calculated a person’s speech 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 ageing.
“It captures both the passage of chronological time and signals coming from cognition, the brain, systemic biology, and even our accumulated social environment,” he added.
The researchers analysed audio recordings of nearly 3,000 Spanish-speaking adults across Latin America. Participants completed a range of tasks, including narrating a short animated film, retelling a story after a 20-minute gap and naming items within given categories.
Using machine learning, the team examined hundreds of features capturing how people speak and what they say, such as speech rate and pauses, pitch, emotional content, vocabulary, and semantic precision, to estimate chronological age and generate an individual “speech age gap”.
What "older" speech shows
The speech clock distinguished healthy individuals from people with dementia. Healthy participants showed the lowest speech age gaps, while progressively wider gaps were seen in people with Alzheimer’s disease and forms of frontotemporal dementia.
People whose speech appears older than expected for their chronological age showed signs of accelerated ageing across several biological and clinical systems. MRI brain scans indicated greater loss of brain structure and altered brain activity.
Older speech scores were also tied 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, focus, 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 may provide a remarkably compact readout of multiple dimensions of aging,” added Ibáñez.
Factors such as chronological age, brain ageing, cognition, and Alzheimer's and dementia phenotypes are traditionally measured with very different and often expensive tools, yet they appear to converge in the way someone speaks, he said.
The authors noted that many current measures of biological ageing require MRI scanners, blood samples or specialised clinical assessments. By contrast, the “speech clock” offers a low-cost, non-invasive, automated alternative that can be carried out remotely on standard devices without specialist medical staff.
The researchers stressed, however, that the speech clock is not yet a diagnostic test for dementia and it cannot establish whether an older-appearing speech profile predicts who will subsequently develop cognitive decline.
