This study, involving 20 adults, introduced a relative target method to examine the fine force control characteristics of the lips. Load equalization for each lip was accomplished by establishing four submaximal target levels related to maximum voluntary closing force. The upper lip was found to be more stable in controlling force at all levels.…

Sixteen listeners (10 expert, 6 naive) judged the dissimilarity of pairs of voices drawn from pathological and normal populations. Only parameters that showed substantial variability were perceptually salient across listeners. Results suggest that traditional means of assessing listener reliability in voice perception tasks may not be appropriate.…

This paper describes the Vocal Demodulator as a new device for analysis of vocal tremor. The Vocal Demodulator produces amplitude-demodulated and frequency-demodulated outputs and measures the frequency and level of low-frequency tremor components in sustained phonation. The paper describes quantification of the demodulation process, validation…

A new method to calculate a spectral harmonics-to-noise (HNR) ratio is presented. The method discriminates between harmonic and noise energy in the magnitude spectrum by means of a comb-filtering operation in the cepstrum domain. HNR is seen to be a useful parameter in the analysis of voice quality. (Author/DB)

Discussion of speech sampling in the assessment of children with phonological disorders focuses on the use of nonlinear phonological analysis, a method whereby multiple aspects or levels of a child's phonological system are examined. Principles and suggestions offer general guidance for adequate sample elicitation. (Contains references.)…

This investigation compared five parameters of phonatory function in an examination of the use of acoustic measures in differential diagnosis in 39 subjects in 3 neuropathological groups (Parkinson, Huntington, cerebellar ataxia) and a normal control group. Results indicated higher variability in perturbation in all the neuropathological groups.…

Vowels produced by four deaf women were analyzed spectrographically to study acoustic correlates of vocal tract deformation. Formant structure evaluated on isovowel lines disclosed consistent neutralization of vowels, which is attributed to observed restricted horizontal movements of the tongue within the oral and pharyngeal cavities. (Author/JDD)

This study analyzed production of a long vowel sound within Finnish words by normal or dysphonic voices, using the Self-Organizing Map, the artificial neural network algorithm of T. Kohonen which produces two-dimensional representations of speech. The method was found to be both sensitive and specific in the detection of dysphonia. (Author/JDD)