Auditory Training and Perceptual Assessment of Spasmodic Dysphonia

The aim of this study is to test the effect of auditory training on spasmodic dysphonia (SD) assessment using an extended version of the GRBAS protocol.

The study involved three groups of participants. The first group consisted of experts who developed the GRBAS benchmark for evaluating SD patients. Only one of the other two groups had received extensive auditory training in the assessment of SD. The training involved listening to audio recordings of dysphonic voices across different severity levels. The task of the control and trained groups was to assess seven SD patients with the extended version of the GRBAS scale. The extension of the scale regarded two parameters, ie, Instability and Fluency, which are usually not captured by GRBAS.

The effect of auditory training on the performance of the trained group varied across the scale parameters. The trained group outperformed the control sample in assessing Grade and Roughness. No significant improvements were reported for Breathiness, Asthenia, or Strain. The highest inter-rater agreement was found for the two additional parameters that reflect common characteristics of a dysphonic voice.

Auditory training and exposure to recordings of cases with varying degrees of SD severity can improve the accuracy of assessments for selected GRBAS scale parameters. Therefore, we propose a simple tool: an application containing examples of different voice qualities, which could help practitioners with SD assessments.