Both The Globe and Mail and CBC ran stories about researchers who compared word lists from Iris Murdoch’s books looking at word variety. See CBC News: Iris Murdoch novel may be evidence of Alzheimer’s. Now that computers index our files (a feature in Tiger, for example), could we get them to warn us when our word variety goes down? Could my e-mail client or blog be fitted to alert me to changes in my use of language?
A quote from the CBC article,
The team chose Murdoch because she did not allow editors to make major changes to her manuscripts.
They found that her vocabulary was richest in The Sea, The Sea, and that she used the fewest number of word types in her last book.
That finding is consistent with other Alzheimer’s patients, who have difficulty finding words, particularly for abstract concepts.
Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s shortly after the publication of Jackson’s Dilemma, and she passed away in 1999. (“Iris Murdoch novel may be evidence of Alzheimer’s”, Dec. 2, 2004, CBC Arts News.)
This is from Kelly Curwin.