Perception of individuals with voice disorders by monolingual English, bilingual Cantonese-English, and bilingual Russian-English women.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of monolingual English, bilingual Cantonese-English, and bilingual Russian-English speakers toward individuals with voice disorders.

Method: In a mixed experimental design, a total of 30 older and 29 younger female listeners from the 3 language groups rated the voices of 10 females, each with a mild, moderate, or severe voice disorder or with no voice disorder. A semantic differential scale was used to rate the speakers on 21 attributes.

Relationship between masking levels and phonatory stability in normal-speaking women.

Disruption of auditory feedback such as masking has been shown to influence vocal production. A reliable finding is an increase in intensity level; an increase in fundamental frequency (F0) is a less robust finding. Research is lacking concerning the effects of auditory masking on measures of phonatory stability such as jitter and harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR).

Fundamental frequency in monolingual English, bilingual English/Russian, and bilingual English/Cantonese young adult women.

Mean F0 of nine young adult English/Russian female bilinguals and nine young adult English/Cantonese female bilinguals were examined from samples of connected speech in each language. Mean F0 were compared in each language and in English with those of a monolingual English control group of ten young adult female speakers. Acoustic measurements were analyzed with the Kay Elemetrics Multispeech program (Kay Elemetrics, Lincoln Park, NJ).

Harmonics-to-noise ratio: an index of vocal aging.

Distinguishing between vocal changes that occur with normal aging and those that are associated with disease is an important goal of research in voice. Several acoustic measures have been used in an attempt to illuminate the integrity of the vocal mechanism, including harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), jitter, and fundamental frequency (F0). HNR is a measure that quantifies the amount of additive noise in the voice signal; jitter reflects the periodicity of vocal fold vibration.