ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004

Suprasegmental analysis for complex quality assessment in pathological voices

Grazyna Demenko, Andrzej Obrebowski, Antoni Pruszewicz, Bozena Wiskirska-Woznica, Piotr Swidzinski, Waldemar Wojnowski

Phoniatric and acoustic examinations were carried out in a group of 30 patients with dysphonia, including 15 with organic and 15 with functional dysphonia. Another group of 18 patients with deep hypoacousis was divided into 3 categories: congenital, pre- and post-lingual. Phoniatric and stroboscopy examinations of the larynx was performed in all cases. The differences between functional and organic dysphonia were found after voice fatigue examination. The analysis of the global statistical features of fundamental frequency distribution estimated from the read text as well as the analysis of changes of Fo parameter in individual utterances was applied. The results of this study have been used in more detailed acoustical and perceptual pathological voice analysis.

In the other group of 100 patients with organic and functional voice disorders complex voice assessments including extended acoustic-perceptual voice estimation in GRBAS scale as well as classical spectrographic and complex MDVP analysis were performed on appropriate linguistic material including vowels, isolated words and a read text.

The importance of complex voice examination is stressed. Voice is a multidimensional phenomena and it cannot be assessed by simple acoustic or phoniatrics methods but only by more complex ones.