Affiliations: [a] National Medical Rehabilitation Centre, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland | [b] Centre for Language and Communication Studies, TCD, Ireland
Abstract: This paper presents a pilot study of the acoustic characteristics of the voice source of two female dysphonic speakers as compared to a normal speaker. One dysphonia was caused by a unilateral vocal fold palsy and the other by a vocal nodule. The principle analysis technique involved first of all inverse filtering the speech wave form, to recover the voice source (the differentiated glottal flow). A model of differentiated glottal flow (the LF-model) was then matched to the output of the inverse filter: source measurements were based on this matched model. Interactive software, developed in the Phonetics Laboratory of the CLCS, Trinity College, Dublin, permitted fine-grained pulse-by-pulse analysis of each voice sample, and is described more fully in an accompanying paper (Ní Chasaide, Gobl and Monahan, 1992). This acoustic technique proved effective in producing profiles which differentiated distinctly not only between the normal and pathological voices, but also between both pathological voices. Some implications of this work are discussed for future research in voice pathology.
Keywords: glottal source, dysphonia, acoustic parameters, F0, EE (excitation strength), RA (dynamic leakage), RK (glottal skew)
