@article{Le2011,
 author = "Xuan Le and Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst and Regina Jokel",
 title = "Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexical and
                  syntactic changes in writing: {A} case study of three
                  {B}ritish novelists",
 year = "2011", 
 volume = "26", 
 number = "4", 
 pages = "435--461",
 journal = "Literary and Linguistic Computing",
 doi = "doi: 10.1093/llc/fqr013",
 abstract = "We present a large-scale longitudinal study of lexical
                  and syntactic changes in language in Alzheimer's
                  disease using complete, fully parsed texts and a
                  large number of measures, using as our subjects the
                  British novelists Iris Murdoch (who died with
                  Alzheimer's), Agatha Christie (who was suspected of
                  it), and P.D. James (who has aged healthily). We
                  avoid the limitations and deficiencies of Garrard et
                  al.'s (2005) earlier study of Iris Murdoch. Our
                  results support the hypothesis that signs of
                  dementia can be found in diachronic analyses of
                  patients' writings, and in addition lead to new
                  understanding of the work of the individual authors
                  whom we studied. In particular, we show that it is
                  probable that Agatha Christie indeed suffered from
                  the onset of Alzheimer's while writing her last
                  novels, and that Iris Murdoch exhibited a `trough'
                  of relatively impoverished vocabulary and syntax in
                  her writing in her late 40s and 50s that presaged
                  her later dementia.",
           note = {Published online 24 May 2011.},
           url = "http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/4/435.full?etoc"
}