Comparing Vocal Health and Attitudes to Voice care in Primary Teachers and Voiceover Artists - A Survey Study Using the Health Belief Model.

Objectives: A range of professions experience high demands on their voices and are potentially at risk of developing voice disorders. Teachers have been studied extensively in this respect, while voiceover artists are a growing professional group with unknown levels of voice training, voice problems and voice care attitudes. To better understand profession-specific voice care requirements, we compared voice training, voice care habits and self-reported voice problems of these two professional groups and measured attitudes to voice care, informed by the Health Belief Model (HBM).

Assessing voice health using smartphones: bias and random error of acoustic voice parameters captured by different smartphone types.

Background: Occupational voice problems constitute a serious public health issue with substantial financial and human consequences for society. Modern mobile technologies such as smartphones have the potential to enhance approaches to prevention and management of voice problems. This paper addresses an important aspect of smartphone-assisted voice care: the reliability of smartphone-based acoustic analysis for voice health state monitoring.

Individual differences in the discrimination of novel speech sounds: effects of sex, temporal processing, musical and cognitive abilities.

This study examined whether rapid temporal auditory processing, verbal working memory capacity, non-verbal intelligence, executive functioning, musical ability and prior foreign language experience predicted how well native English speakers (N=120) discriminated Norwegian tonal and vowel contrasts as well as a non-speech analogue of the tonal contrast and a native vowel contrast presented over noise. Results confirmed a male advantage for temporal and tonal processing, and also revealed that temporal processing was associated with both non-verbal intelligence and speech processing. In contrast, effects of musical ability on non-native speech-sound processing and of inhibitory control on vowel discrimination were not mediated by temporal processing.

Cross-language differences in fundamental frequency range: a comparison of English and German.

This paper presents a systematic comparison of various measures of f0 range in female speakers of English and German. F0 range was analyzed along two dimensions, level (i.e.

[Solitary pulmonary nodule].

Primary pulmonary amyloidosis is rare. Three patterns of involvement have been described: tracheobronchial, nodular and diffuse parenchymal. The nodular parenchymal amyloid deposits are often multiple, much less common focal.