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Predictors of Loneliness in Older Adults Using Multimodal Analysis of Speech and Language

Vinmay Khandode, Sai Karthik Kosuri, Neil K. R. Sehgal, Adam Greene, Elif Alpoge, Elana Duffy, Matthew Lee Smith, Thomas K. M. Cudjoe, Sharath Chandra Guntuku

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arxiv Score 5.3

Published 2026-09-02 · First seen 2026-09-03

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Abstract

Loneliness is a critical public health issue among older adults, linked to higher risks of depression, cognitive decline, and mortality. Scalable, objective methods for its detection remain limited, particularly in natural conversational contexts. We analyzed speech and language markers of loneliness in 310 older adults using semi-structured telephone interviews to help understand how they process feeling lonely and how their language differs at different levels of feeling loneliness. Our multimodal framework combined linguistic features (psycholinguistic dictionaries, n-grams, and topic models) with acoustic features (pitch, tone, loudness) to examine associations with self-reported loneliness scores. Both predefined and data-driven methods captured patterns in verbal content and vocal delivery. Higher loneliness was associated with negations(r = 0.11), negative tone(r = 0.12), and conflict-related language. Lower loneliness was linked to social references(r = -0.18), motivational drives(r = -0.11), and emotional richness in speech(r = -0.12). We also found that the multimodal model (r = 0.298) outperforms the text-only and audio-only models. Findings suggest that loneliness manifests through both linguistic and acoustic cues, supporting the potential of speech-based analysis in psychological assessments and as an early indicator of emotional loneliness when used alongside existing assessments, rather than as standalone diagnostic tools.

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BibTeX

@article{khandode2026predictors,
  title = {Predictors of Loneliness in Older Adults Using Multimodal Analysis of Speech and Language},
  author = {Vinmay Khandode and Sai Karthik Kosuri and Neil K. R. Sehgal and Adam Greene and Elif Alpoge and Elana Duffy and Matthew Lee Smith and Thomas K. M. Cudjoe and Sharath Chandra Guntuku},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Loneliness is a critical public health issue among older adults, linked to higher risks of depression, cognitive decline, and mortality. Scalable, objective methods for its detection remain limited, particularly in natural conversational contexts. We analyzed speech and language markers of loneliness in 310 older adults using semi-structured telephone interviews to help understand how they process feeling lonely and how their language differs at different levels of feeling loneliness. Our multim},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02606},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2609.02606},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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