BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to develop and validate the first ever speech-specific perceptual speech-evaluation tool for patients with head and neck cancer. METHODS Five speech parameters (intelligibility, articulation, speech rate, nasality, and asthenia) and overall grade were included and evaluated. Speech samples of 117 subjects were recorded on electroglottograph equipment using...

Certain of the complex spectral effects of vowel nasalization bear a resemblance to the effects of modifying the tongue or jaw position with which the vowel is produced. Perceptual evidence suggests that listener misperceptions of nasal vowel height arise as a result of this resemblance. Whereas previous studies examined isolated nasal vowels, this research focused on the role of phonetic conte...

In acoustic studies of vowel nasalization, it is sometimes assumed that the primary articulatory difference between an oral vowel and a nasal vowel is the coupling of the nasal cavity to the rest of the vocal tract. Acoustic modulations observed in nasal vowels are customarily attributed to the presence of additional poles affiliated with the naso-pharyngeal tract and zeros affiliated with the ...

INTRODUCTION Little is known about the treatment outcomes of children with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) receiving surgical care for primary lip and palate closure in Malaysia. OBJECTIVES This study examined the speech and hearing status of Malay-speaking children with CLP residing in Kuala Lumpur. METHODS Parents whose children were between the age of 5 and 7 years were recruited via the C...

Resonance is one of the most prominent characteristics of human speech. Problems affecting nasal resonance are widely reported in speech pathologies, causing severe perturbations in subjects speech intelligibility. Nasal resonance values can be obtained through different instrumental methods, however, the nasometer proved to be an indirect and objective assessment instrument which results have ...

To evaluate and compare the speech in unilateral and bilateral cleft lip and palate children treated with and without presurgicalorthopaedics based on their palatal dimensions.Perceptual and digital evaluation of speech in cleft lip and palate childrencompared with there palatal dimensions.Twenty subjects with a history of cleft lip and palate or velopharyngeal dysfunction and speech disorder.G...

Speech quality of patients with oral or oropharyngeal carcinoma was assessed by perceptual and acoustic-phonetic analyses. Speech recordings of running speech of patients before and 6 and 12 months after treatment for oral or oropharyngeal cancer and of 18 control speakers were evaluated regarding intelligibility, nasality and articulation, which revealed deteriorated speech in 20% of the patie...

There is great phonetic variation of words in context, conditioned by phonetic environment, word type, and speaking style in different communicative situations. Function words and modal particles are particularly susceptible to having their phonetic weight and complexity reduced, especially in casual spontaneous speech. But even if whole strings of segments are no longer delimitable in reduced ...

The conditions under which listeners do and do not compensate for coarticulatory vowel nasalization were examined through a series of experiments of listeners' perception of naturally produced American English oral and nasal vowels spliced into three contexts: oral (C_C), nasal (N_N), and isolation. Two perceptual paradigms, a rating task in which listeners judged the relative nasality of stimu...

Little is known about the perceptual importance of changes in the shape of the source spectrum, although many measures have been proposed and correlations with different vocal qualities (breathiness, roughness, nasality, strain...) have frequently been reported. This study investigated just-noticeable differences in the relative amplitudes of the first two harmonics (H1-H2) for speakers of Mand...