What is it about?
This study looked at whether everyday spoken language can reveal how well our thinking skills are working. These thinking skills, known as executive functions, help us plan, stay organized, and shift between ideas. We collected simple picture-description speech samples from adults aged 18 to 90 and analyzed features such as pauses, hesitations, and how smoothly the description flowed. We found that people who showed stronger executive function tended to produce speech with fewer disfluencies (for example, fewer “ums” or moments of searching for words). This relationship was present not only in older adults but across the entire adult lifespan.
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Why is it important?
Speech is natural, quick to collect, and can be measured remotely, which makes it promising for large-scale or repeated monitoring of cognitive health. Most prior work focuses only on aging or dementia. Our study shows that everyday speech also reflects meaningful variations in thinking skills throughout adulthood. This opens the possibility of using speech-based tools to support earlier detection, everyday monitoring, and more accessible assessment alongside standard cognitive testing.
Perspectives
From my viewpoint, the strengths of this work lie in its alignment with naturalistic assessment and lifespan coverage. Speaking is something we all do every day, and it may contain subtle clues about how our minds are managing and organizing information. At the same time, it is important to recognize that speech is only one part of cognition, and we should treat it as a complement, not a replacement, for broader assessment tools. Moreover, by stepping outside purely older‐adult or clinical samples, we demonstrate that speech features are meaningful across ages, and that executive function differences are not just “normal ageing vs dementia,” but a continuum. Moving forward, I am particularly interested in exploring how speech changes over time, and whether those changes might help identify early shifts in thinking before they become noticeable in daily life.
Hsi (Tiana) Wei
McGill University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Natural Speech Analysis Can Reveal Individual Differences in Executive Function Across the Adult Lifespan, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, November 2025, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2025_jslhr-24-00268.
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