Developmental psychology tells that infants acquire language through the vocal imitation but no infants try to imitate the voices of their parents. It is known that myna birds imitate the voices and sounds of their keepers. Why don’t infants imitate the voices and sounds? Since the timbral characteristics of sounds are completely controlled by the shape of the sound generator, the voice imitati...

The goal of this study is to quantify the effects of vocal fold nodules on vibratory motion in children using high-speed videoendoscopy. Differences in vibratory motion were evaluated in 20 children with vocal fold nodules (5-11 years) and 20 age and gender matched typically developing children (5-11 years) during sustained phonation at typical pitch and loudness. Normalized kinematic features ...

Emotional state affects the physiological mechanism involved in phonation. Differences in acoustical parameters of the voice under stress have been attributed to the coping mechanism used, which is based on the individual's perception of the situation. This study examines the relationship between coping strategies, personality, and voice in female subjects, ranging in age from 19.3-55.7 years, ...

Most singers prefer to warm up their voices before performing. Although the subjective effect is often considerable, the underlying physiological effects are largely unknown. Because warm-up tends to increase blood flow in muscles, it seems likely that vocal warm-up might induce decreased viscosity in the vocal folds. According to the theory of vocal-fold vibration, such a decrease should lead ...

The effects of 2 forms of response interruption and redirection (RIRD)-motor RIRD and vocal RIRD-were examined with 4 boys with autism to evaluate further the effects of this intervention and its potential underlying mechanisms. In Experiment 1, the effects of motor RIRD and vocal RIRD on vocal stereotypy and appropriate vocalizations were compared for 2 participants. In Experiment 2, the effec...

To verify the efficiency and to determine the cutoff values that discriminate children/adolescents with and without vocal complaints, as well as the measures of sensibility, specificity and efficiency of the Brazilian Pediatric Voice-Related Quality-of-Life Survey (P-VRQOL). The participants included 230 parents of children/adolescents of both genders, aged between 2 years and 18 years, with an...

OBJECTIVE To analyze factors associated with the prevalence of the medical diagnosis of vocal fold pathologies in teachers. METHODS A census-based epidemiological, cross-sectional study was conducted with 4,495 public primary and secondary school teachers in the city of Salvador, Northeastern Brazil, between March and April 2006. The dependent variable was the self-reported medical diagnosis ...

This study explored the temporal course of vocal and emotional sound processing. Participants detected rare repetitions in a stimulus stream comprising neutral and surprised non-verbal exclamations and spectrally rotated control sounds. Spectral rotation preserved some acoustic and emotional properties of the vocal originals. Event-related potentials elicited to unrepeated sounds revealed effec...

The nonverbal vocal utterances of seven normally hearing infants were studied within their first year of life with respect to age- and emotion-related changes. Supported by a multiparametric acoustic analysis it was possible to distinguish one inspiratory and eleven expiratory call types. Most of the call types appeared within the first two months; some emerged in the majority of infants not un...

Inter-individual relationships particularly in socially living mammals often require a well-developed communication system. Vocal and olfactory signals are the most important for the communication of rhinos, however, their vocal communication has been investigated to a very limited extent so far. White rhinos have the most developed social system out of all the rhinoceros species and vocal sign...