The effect of speaking task on perceptual judgment of the severity of dysphonic voice.

This study investigated the effect of speaking task on auditory-perceptual judgment of the severity of dysphonia. Three speech-language pathologists experienced in evaluating of disordered voices rated 29 recorded speakers, each of whom produced speech elicited via the same three tasks: sustained vowel /a/, oral reading of a standard passage, and connected speech describing a standard picture. Stimuli were played in sound field, and raters used direct magnitude estimation with a visual analog scale.