Linguistic Markers in the Sentence Writing Question of the Mini-Mental State Examination for Discrimination between Alzheimer's and Vascular Dementia

A set of 418 Mini-Mental State Examinations (MMSE) is analysed with the goal of identifying linguistic markers for discriminating between Alzheimer's Disease and Vascular Dementia. The markers are identified by automatically annotating the sentence writing question of the MMSE with syntactic information. 101 variables are extracted from the annotations which are compared with the MMSE questions for information about the diagnosis. Out of the 101 variables, 14 are identified which are within the top 10 of the MMSE questions. Words per sentence, maximal word length, use of adjectives, nouns, verbs and number of subject clauses are discussed in detail.