SUMMARY
Purpose
Speech fundamental frequency (SFF) assessment is essential for all dysphonia patients
to effectively evaluate the therapeutic effects of voice therapy, especially in patients
with disturbances in their voice pitch due to mutational dysphonia, Reinke's edema,
or as side effects of hormone therapy. A standard method of SFF measurement remains
unknown. Speech tasks such as sustained vowel phonation, counting, reading passage,
and spontaneous speech have generally been used for SFF measurements. Ideally, spontaneous
speech best reflects SFF; however, this task has not yet been clearly defined and
is limited with regard to its adaptation to a clinical setting. A reliable task for
SFF measurement in Japanese, which corresponds to a speech task that most closely
reflects the value that would be observed with typical spontaneous speech, has not
been investigated. This study aimed to identify a reliable speech task by measuring
the SFF values elicited by different widely used speech tasks in Japanese, and assess
its reliability and coefficient of determination (R2).
Methods
Sixty healthy volunteers (30 men and 30 women; aged 19–30 years; mean age 22.5 years)
were enrolled. All experimental procedures were performed in Japanese. The SFF values
for the speech tasks were determined through the voice samples recorded using a Pulse
Code Modulation (PCM) recorder. Each task, except spontaneous speech, was repeated
five times, and the average fundamental frequency in each task was determined as the
SFF. To assess the reliability of the SFF values across daily variations within individual
speakers, the SFF measurements were repeated on two different days, separated by at
least 1 week.
Results
The SFF values of sustained /a/ phonation, sustained vowel-average, counting, reading
passage, and spontaneous speech had excellent reliability, in terms of their reproduction
based on intraclass correlation. Significantly high SFF values were observed, in decreasing
order, for sustained vowels-average, counting, reading passage, and spontaneous speech
in both males and females. The highest R2 for spontaneous speech was that of reading passage in both males (R2 = 0.771) and females (R2 = 0.806) (P < 0.01).
Conclusion
When spontaneous speech was presented as a task most reflective of daily conversation,
reading passage was determined to be the reliable task to assess the therapeutic effect
of voice therapy in Japanese.
KEY WORDS
Abbreviations:
SFF (speech fundamental frequency), ANOVA (analysis of variance), ICC (intraclass correlation coefficient)To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: January 14, 2021
Accepted:
December 17,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2021 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
