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The study, from academics at Cardiff University, Loughborough University and the University of Oxford, used computer software to analyse the range of nouns and adjectives used in 33 of his best-selling Discworld novels.
The results show a significant decrease in the diversity of nouns and adjectives in his later works. This shift was particularly marked in the diversity of adjectives, which decreased below a defined threshold approximately ten years before Pratchett's formal diagnosis.
Sir Terry Pratchett died in 2015 at the age of 66. He had posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's disease that primarily affects visual processing.
Study co-author Dr Melody Pattison, based at Cardiff University's School of English, Communication and Philosophy, said: "Our analysis of Sir Terry Pratchett's novels suggests that subtle changes in linguistic patterns, such as decreased lexical diversity, may precede clinical diagnosis of dementia by a considerable margin. In particular we found the richness of descriptive language in his books gradually narrowed."
We would normally expect less lexical diversity as texts get longer, but even after controlling for text length our findings were still significant. This was not something a reader would necessarily notice, but rather a subtle, progressive change. --Dr Melody Pattison
[...] "Research indicates that memory problems may not be the first symptom of dementia. We wanted to explore whether language could be an early warning sign, and to do this, we used Sir Terry Pratchett's books, who himself suffered dementia.
"Our analysis found that Sir Terry's use of language did indeed change during his career. These results suggest that language may be one of the first signs of dementia, and Sir Terry's books reveal a potential new approach for early diagnosis."
Journal Reference: Brain Sci. 2026, 16(1), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci16010094
(Score: 2) by bd on Thursday February 12, @11:26PM (2 children)
You are absolutely correct.
Even more so, the raw data shows a nearly linear decrease over _all_ of his published novels, that - if anything - plateaued out when he reached his mid-fifties.
The "decline during the last 9 years" only appears after very creative application of a "cutoff threshold" that has nothing special about it in the overall curve form.
What is missing is a comparison between a statistically significant amount of prolific authors that did, and did not die from dementia.
They cited works where the same analysis was done on three authors with dementia and a single non-dementia control?!
So they found _one_ author that did not die of dementia and had constant adjective usage well into his 80's...
Why only study the works of a single author?! This would have been a 10 minute google search and some scraping of project Gutenberg at the most to find a few authors of either category.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday February 13, @05:35PM (1 child)
Another effect here would be the pulp mill. His first Discworld novel came out in 1983 and it was three years till the second came out. By the early 2000s (which would be where the mid-50s puts him, being born in 1948), he was cranking out almost two books a year. My take is that level of output will decrease the overall quality of the writing. In that light, he only published two books in the last four years of his life (plus whatever else he had been working on) which appears to be a significant decrease in output in addition to the alleged decline in range of language.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday February 13, @09:15PM
As far as I can recall from memory now his daughter said they had books, ideas and short stories for about ten or so books worth in storage. But according to his will it was all be destroyed upon his death. They bulldozed the harddrives and backup with said content after his death. He didn't want them to keep publishing his materials after his death. His daughter now runs the Discworld empire, sort of like some of Tolkiens kids does or did for his estate. I'm not sure if they have really found other authors to write new Discworld material after him.
So it could be cause he didn't want them to publish his works after his death or that perhaps there were other reasons.