Journaling Task (JOT)

Capture naturalistic, self-generated speech with open-ended prompts 

The Journaling Task (JOT) uses open-ended prompts to elicit natural, self-generated speech, enabling researchers to investigate acoustic and linguistic characteristics with minimal constraints on what participants say or how they say it. 

  • Administration time: 2 minutes

Voice tasks

Verbal Paired Associates (VPA)

Digit Span (DGS)

Verbal Recognition Memory (VRM)

Task format










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Recommended use


In the Journaling Task, participants respond freely to an open-ended prompt. Unlike structured tasks, JOT captures language as it emerges naturally, revealing aspects of spontaneous speech, language organization and expression that may be less apparent in highly structured assessments. 

This makes JOT well suited to exploring coherence, expression and spontaneous language use across a range of research questions. 

 

  • Fluency — patterns in spontaneous speech production 
  • Prosody — rhythm, stress and intonation 
  • Lexical richness — the range and diversity of language used 
  • Syntactic structure — how words and sentences are constructed 
  • Semantic coherence — how meaning and ideas are connected 
  • Sentiment — features relating to the emotional content of language 
 
 
We recommend using this voice-based cognitive assessment in: 
 
Psychiatry, including major depressive disorder (MDD) and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) 
 

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Cambridge Cognition
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