Examining the Perception of Vocal Deviation by Dysphonic and Nondysphonic Women

To investigate the auditory perception of vocal deviation by dysphonic and nondysphonic women and to correlate the accuracy rate with acoustic measurements.

In total, 24 dysphonic women allocated to an experimental group (EG) and 10 nondysphonic women allocated to the control group (CG) participated in this study. The volunteers filled in the vocal screening form the vocal symptom scale (VoiSS) self-assessment protocol and made voice recordings during the emission of the vowel /Ɛ/, whose degree of deviation was examined through perceptual-auditory and acoustic evaluation; all the participants underwent audiometry. Three experiments were conducted for the perception tests. The first experiment consisted of randomly presenting 38 stimuli in isolation, 10 of which were healthy voices and 28 with different degrees of deviation, so that each participant could classify them as normal or altered. In the second experiment, the participants heard only breathy and healthy voices with different degrees of deviation and had to discriminate the presence or absence of breathiness. The third experiment was similar to the second experiment but with a rough voice.

Women in the EG had a lower hit rate (52.2%) in identifying dysphonic voices than women in the CG (69.6%) (P < 0.001). The women in the EG had a lower accuracy rate in identifying predominantly rough (62.7%) and breathy (62%) voices, compared with the accuracy rate of the women in the CG (73% and 75.6%, respectively) (P value < 0.001). There was a moderate negative correlation between the hit rate of nondysphonic women and the shimmer values.

Dysphonia can interfere with the identification of dysphonic voices. Dysphonic women had a lower accuracy rate in identifying dysphonia and roughness and breathiness parameters than nondysphonic women.