SUMMARY
Objective
Clinical assessment of voice quality (VQ) often uses a combination of sustained phonations
and more prolonged and more complex vocalizations. The purpose of this study was to
compare the perceived vocal breathiness and vocal roughness of sustained phonations
and connected speech over a wide range of dysphonia severity and to evaluate their
relationship with acoustic measures and bioinspired models of breathiness and roughness.
Methods
VQ dimension-specific single-variable matching task (SVMT) was used to index the perceived
breathiness or roughness of five male and five female talkers on the basis of a sustained
/a/ phonation and the 5th CAPE-V sentence. Acoustic measures of cepstral peak, autocorrelation
peak and psychoacoustic measures of pitch strength, and temporal envelope standard
deviation (EnvSD) was used to predict perceived breathiness and roughness judgments
obtained from 10 listeners, respectively.
Results
High intra- and inter-listener reliability was observed for sustained phonations and
connected speech. Perceived breathiness and roughness of sustained vowels and sentences
obtained using SVMT were highly correlated for most dysphonic voices. The pitch strength
model of breathiness was able to capture larger amount of perceptual variance compared
to cepstral peak in both vowels and sentences. Autocorrelation peak was strongly correlated
to perceived roughness in sentences while EnvSD was strongly correlated to perceived
roughness in vowels.
Conclusions
Results provide evidence that perception of VQ via SVMT can be successfully extended
to connected speech. Computational models of VQ can be easily adapted to connected
speech. Such automated models of VQ perception are valuable due to their computational
efficiency and their ability to accurately capture the non-linearities of the human
auditory system.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 16, 2023
Accepted:
February 13,
2023
Publication stage
In Press Corrected ProofFootnotes
Parts of this work were presented at the 172nd and 174th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
Parts of this work were presented at the 46th and 47th Annual Symposium of the Voice Foundation: Care of the Professional Voice.
This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communicative Disorders R01DC009029 (RS and DAE). The author wishes to thank Shawntel Fuerte for assistance with data collection, Mark D. Skowronski, Erol Ozmeral, and Yeonggwang Park for data analyses and Figure 2, and Yeonggwang Park and David Eddins for reviewing initial drafts of this manuscript.
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© 2023 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
