Do you get nervous when you can’t think of a word? Chances are it’s a momentary lapse, but problems with language are one of the symptoms that can indicate a neurodegenerative disorder like Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, diagnosing these conditions requires scoring below a rather low threshold on a test battery administered by a specialist. This often means, says Mark Liberman, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics in the School of Arts & Sciences, that people have already been suffering from the disease for a decade or more when they’re diagnosed.
Liberman, the director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, is working with researchers at Penn…
