Summary
Objective
The current paper examined the impact of dysphonia on the bandwidth of the first two
formants of vowels, and the relationship between the formant bandwidth and vowel intelligibility.
Methods
Speaker participants of the study were 10 adult females with healthy voice and 10
adult females with dysphonic voice. Eleven vowels in American English were recorded
in /h/-vowel-/d/ format. The vowels were presented to 10 native speakers of American
English with normal hearing, who were asked to select a vowel they heard from a list
of /h/-vowel-/d/ words. The vowels were acoustically analyzed to measure the bandwidth
of the first and second formants (B1 and B2). Separate Wilcoxon rank sum tests were
conducted for each vowel for normal and dysphonic speech because the differences in
B1 and B2 were found to not be normally distributed. Spearman correlation tests were
conducted to evaluate the association between the difference in formant bandwidths
and vowel intelligibility between the healthy and dysphonic speakers.
Results
B1 was significantly greater in dysphonic vowels for seven of the eleven vowels, and
lesser for only one of the vowels. There was no statistically significant difference
in B2 between the normal and dysphonic vowels, except for the vowel /i/. The difference
in B1 between normal and dysphonic vowels strongly predicted the intelligibility difference.
Conclusion
Dysphonia significantly affects B1, and the difference in B1 may serve as an acoustic
marker for the intelligibility reduction in dysphonic vowels. This acoustic-perceptual
relationship should be confirmed by a larger-scale study in the future.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: October 31, 2020
Accepted:
October 15,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
