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Immediate effects of voice focus adjustments on hypernasal speakers' nasalance scores
Charlene Santoni1, Michael Thaut2, Tim Bressmann3
1Department of Music and Health Science, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, Edward Johnson Building, 80 Queen's Park, Toronto, ON, M5S 2C5, Canada; Department of Speech-Language Pathology, University of Toronto, Rehabilitation Sciences Building, 160-500 University Avenue, Toronto, ON, M5G 1V7, Canada.
Objectives:
To explore the immediate effects of voice focus adjustments on the oral-nasal balance of hypernasal speakers, measured with nasalance scores.
Methods:
Five hypernasal speakers (2 M, 3 F) aged 5-12 (SD 2.7) learned to speak with extreme forward and backward voice focus. Speakers repeated oral, nasal, and phonetically balanced stimuli. Nasalance scores were collected with the Nasometer 6450.
Results:
From the average baseline of 34.27% for the oral stimulus, nasalance increased to 46.07% in forward and decreased to 30.2% in backward focus. From the average baseline of 64.53% for the nasal stimulus, nasalance decreased to 64.13% in forward and decreased to 51.73% in backward focus. From the average baseline of 51.33% for the phonetically balanced stimulus, nasalance increased to 58.87% in forward and decreased to 46.2% in backward focus.
Conclusions:
Forward voice focus resulted in higher and backward voice focus resulted in lower nasalance scores during speech for a group of hypernasal speakers. However, there was an exception: One male speaker showed decreased nasalance in forward voice focus. Future research should investigate the longer-term effectiveness of the intervention.
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