Tell me: Do these situations sound familiar?
You’re telling a story, and right in the middle of it, the specific word you want simply isn’t there.
You know exactly what you’re trying to say, but what comes out is “you know, the thing.”
Someone asks you a question and you pause — genuinely pause — hunting for a word you’ve used a thousand times.
If so, you’re not alone. A new study from Baycrest, the University of Toronto, and York University suggests those moments might suggest more than we realized.
The study, published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, ran two experiments.
In the first, researchers recorded 67 healthy older adults, aged 65 to 75, who had to describe complex pictures aloud.
They also completed standard tests of executive function, the list of mental skills that govern memory, planning, and flexible thinking.
In the second experiment, they expanded to 174 healthy adults spanning ages 18 to 90.
Using machine learning, they analyzed hundreds of subtle speech features across all those recordings. These included things like pauses, filler words like “uh” and “um,” timing patterns, and moments of word-finding difficulty.
Then they compared those features to how people actually scored on the cognitive tests.
The connection was consistent and independent of age, sex, and education. The strongest signal came from speech disfluencies specifically — the pauses and stumbles that happen when a word won’t come.
Those predicted executive function scores across the full adult lifespan, not just among older participants.
“The message is clear,” said senior author Jed Meltzer of Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. “Speech timing is more than just a matter of style, it’s a sensitive indicator of brain health.”
The practical problem with existing dementia screening is that standard cognitive tests are hard to repeat reliably.
People get better at them with practice, which makes it difficult to track whether someone is actually changing over time.
Speech doesn’t have that problem. Everyone produces it every day, naturally, without effort — even though another recent study suggests we’re all speaking a lot less than we used to. It requires no clinical setting and no formal test. It could theoretically be tracked over time, which is what makes it interesting as a monitoring tool.
“This research sets the stage for exciting opportunities to develop tools that could help track cognitive changes in clinics or even at home,” Meltzer said in a press release. “Early detection is critical for any cure or intervention, as dementia involves progressive degeneration of the brain that may be slowed.”
Heather Whitson, a neuroscience professor at Duke School of Medicine who was not involved with the study, noted in other coverage that language difficulty is one of the most consistently observed features across all dementia types.
“Difficulty finding common words is a feature that we look for, and that we know occurs,” she said.
The sample sizes here are modest — 67 people in the first experiment, 174 in the second — and both studies measured participants at only one point in time. The researchers are explicit that longitudinal studies, following the same people over time, are needed before any of this becomes a usable clinical tool.
So, this is promising early work, not a finished answer.
Also, I want to add a note of reassurance before anyone reading this spirals: Everyone stumbles on words sometimes.
A lot of people naturally speak with plenty of “ums” and “uhs” for reasons that have nothing to do with cognitive decline—nervousness, personality, speaking style, the fact that they’re genuinely thinking carefully before they talk.
The researchers here are looking for patterns, measured against an individual’s own baseline over time.
That’s also why a real longitudinal study would be so welcome. A single snapshot of how you speak today can’t tell you much, but how your speech changes over time compared to your own prior speech—that’s where the signal would live.
Oh, and remember that Meltzer specifically mentioned the hope for “cure or intervention” as opposed to just getting warning signs of cognitive decline.
“The single best thing you can do is go on a walk with your friend,” Meltzer told a Canadian television program.
Taken all together, that’s one of those things you might call — oh wait, what’s the word?
Hopeful.
Other things worth knowing …
Axios: President Trump’s Iran deal has opened an explosive second front in MAGA’s civil war, waged by hawkish allies who view U.S. concessions as an existential betrayal of Israel. Many of the critics are careful not to attack Trump himself. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called on “the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance,” to come before Congress to defend it.
Bloomberg: In a little over a week, Elon Musk’s net worth has increased by more than $600 billion. That’s about the combined net worth of the second- and third-wealthiest people in the world — Google guys Larry Page at $317 billion and Sergey Brin at $295 billion. The SpaceX IPO is also “truly subjecting passive investing to an epic test” because ordinary Americans’ retirement and investment accounts are now so dominated by stakes in just a few enormous companies.
NPR: UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited Port-au-Prince as a new international “gang-suppression force” prepares to deploy to Haiti, where gang violence has killed 2,300 people and led to another 100 kidnappings so far this year.
NBC News: A Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was abruptly postponed Wednesday after Trump said he was “cancelling it” over a political dispute with Democrats — an unusual intervention into his own nominee’s confirmation process.
Fox News: Investigators examining Monday's fatal B-52 crash at Edwards Air Force Base are focusing on the bomber's engines and controllability; the aircraft had been undergoing a radar modernization test mission when it went down, killing all eight aboard.
ESPN: The four World Cup matches on Tuesday set a new record for the most attended day in the history of the tournament. A new mark of 281,223 eclipsed the previous record of 277,070 set at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, which also featured four matches.
ScienceDaily: Scientists used genome editing to block red pigment production in lettuce, causing other beneficial plant compounds to build up instead — and the lettuce continued growing normally. Researchers say the technique points toward a new way to engineer produce with boosted nutritional properties without affecting yield.
Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.