Abstract The Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) is a screening tool for cognitive impairment. It has been extensively validated and is widely used, but has been criticized as not being effective in detecting mild cognitive impairment (MCI). In this study, we examine the utility of augmenting MMSE scores with automatically extracted linguistic information from a narrative speech task to better differentiate between individuals with MCI and healthy controls in a Swedish population. We find that with the addition of just four linguistic features, the AUC score (measuring a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity) is improved from 0.68 to 0.87 in logistic regression classification. These preliminary results suggest that the accuracy of traditional screening tools may be improved through the addition of computerized language analysis.