In 10 years of school district voice clinics, 249 cases were reviewed. Vocal nodules, chronic laryngitis and thickened cords were frequently noted. One-third of the cases had concomitant allergies, ear, and/or upper respiratory problems. Direct voice therapy was recommended for 65 percent of attendees. (Author/CL)

Speech teachers and singing teachers have much in common. Both attempt in their teaching to develop the most powerful and effective instrument possible while trying to avoid vocal problems. Both have studied the physiology of the vocal mechanism to assist them in their teaching. Both are concerned with the expressive qualities of the voice as well…

The maximum phoneme duration (MPD) of /s/ and /z/ task was measured for eight male and eight female children with diagnosed vocal nodules. Found that vocal nodules do not affect MPD s/z ratio, whereas the durations of /s/ and /z/ and the variance observed across multiple productions of /z/ are affected and should be considered as diagnostically…

Thirty-eight elementary grade school children with hoarse voices participated in a six-lesson, cartoon-illustrated vocal hygiene program that provided information concerning the human voice, voice quality, vocal abuse, and proper use of the voice. (Author)

Voicing onset changes between control conditions and three fluency-evoking conditions (choral reading, delayed auditory feedback, and noise) were studied in 10 individuals who stutter and in 12 controls. Results indicate that although fluency-evoking conditions modified some voicing-onset behaviors, these modifications did not relate to…

Many Down Syndrome children have some disruption in the oral communicative processes, including an unusual voice quality which may have negative social effects. Factors to be considered include fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency range, frequency perturbations, amplitude perturbations, spectral noise, formant amplitude, and oral and nasal…

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…

This study of 21 children (ages 4-6) found that children with stuttering and disordered phonology produced more sound prolongations and fewer iterations per whole-word repetition than did children who stuttered but had normal phonology. No differences were noted between children with stuttering and disordered phonology and children with disordered…

Laryngectomized patients using esophageal speech or an electronic artificial larynx have difficulty producing correct voicing contrasts between homorganic consonants. This paper describes a therapy technique that emphasizes "pushing harder" on voiceless consonants to improve alaryngeal speech intelligibility and proposes focusing on the…

This study correlated measures of nasalance computed by the Nasometer with listener judgments of nasality of speech passages spoken by 25 children with craniofacial disorders. Results showed a significant correlation between nasalance and nasality only when nasal consonants were not included in the passage spoken. (Author/DB)

A new method is presented for the parameterization of glottal volume velocity waveforms that have been estimated by inverse filtering acoustic speech pressure signals. The new technique combines two features of voice production: the AC value and the spectral decay of the glottal flow. Testing found the new parameter correlates strongly with the…

Intraoral air pressure was recorded during the production of consonant cognate pairs by 8 esophageal speakers (mean age 67 years) under 2 experimental conditions: after the insufflation of air and without air insufflation. Results revealed that peak intraoral air pressure magnitudes were significantly greater following the insufflation of air than…