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Scoping Review of Multiparametric Measures for Assessing Voice Quality in Voice Disorders: Focus on Continuous Speech
Hélène Massis1, Amélie Elmerich1, Frédérique Frouin2
1LPP, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CNRS, 4 rue des Irlandais, Paris 75005, France.
Objectives/Hypotheses:
This study provides an overview of the acoustic and auditory‑perceptual measures used to assess voice quality in dysphonic patients using continuous speech corpora.
Study Design:
This study is a scoping review.
Methods:
Database searches were conducted in English and French (PubMed, ScienceDirect, APA PsycInfo, Web of Science, Thèses.fr https://theses.fr/?domaine=theses) on February 8, 2024 and May 9, 2025, using the following keywords: "speech," "voice quality," "assessment," and "dysphonia." Inclusion criteria targeted original studies of patients with acquired dysphonia using continuous speech corpora. Selected works had to question the measures and/or corpora they employed.
Results And Conclusions:
Out of 2483 articles, 32 studies-mostly in English-were analyzed by three evaluators. These studies predominantly used acoustic measures together with perceptual parameters, such as cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and its smoothed version (CPPS). These two parameters had the most frequently reported statistically significant between-group differences and the highest area under the curve values for differentiating dysphonic speakers from normophonic speakers, followed by maximum phonation time and shimmer. With high inter- and intra-rater agreement, the perceptual parameters most often used were the Grade (G) of the GRBASI scale and the overall severity of the consensus auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice, both well-correlated with CPP and CPPS. Measures computed on continuous speech achieved the highest rates of statistically significant between-group differences across studies. Continuous speech appears to be essential in voice assessment in capturing the influence of phonetic contexts on the phonatory difficulties observed in dysphonic voices, serving as a more reliable task, close to natural speech. Because corpus choice itself influences both acoustic and perceptual measures, it must be carefully examined in order to properly weigh results.
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