Normative Values for PRAAT in the Age Range of 5-10 Years Old Typically Developing Children

There are several softwares which have their normative values like MDVP, Dr Speech, and Vaghmi. The present study aims to establish a normative data for PRAAT software in the age range of 5-10 yrs. for Indian population. Two hundred and fifty children (between the age ranges of 5-10 years) participated in the study. Voice samples were elicited by asking each participant to produce sustained phonations of /a/, /i/ and /u/ sounds at his or her habitual levels of pitch and loudness lasting longer than 3 seconds. Each subject’s Fundamental Frequency (Fo), jitter, shimmer, signal to noise ratio (SNR) and noise to harmonic ratio (HNR) were measured and analyzed using PRAAT software. Based on the acoustic analysis, the result of the current study is presented below, for children in the age range of 5-10 yrs a mean FO of for /a/ is 271.6,/i/ is 287.2 and /u/ is 292.3; jitter of 0.6851 % for /a/, 0.4752% for /i/ and 0.5657% for /u/; shimmer of 0.4549 for /a/, 0.3220 /i/ and 0.2775/u/;SNR of .0269 for /a/;0.0184 for/i/ and 0.0068 for /u/; HNR for /a/ is 17.5413, 19.9144 for /i/ and 25.5379 for /u/. Normatives obtained from PRAAT can be further used to compare the characteristics of abnormal and normal population.