Somatosensation plays an important role in the motor control of vocal functions, yet its neural correlate and relation to vocal learning is not well understood. We used fMRI in 17 trained singers and 12 nonsingers to study the effects of vocal-fold anesthesia on the vocal-motor singing network as a function of singing expertise. Tasks required participants to sing musical target intervals under...

BACKGROUND Quality and frequency variability of adolescents' voice, during puberty, in different phonation tasks. AIM To analyze the vocal stability of adolescents in three different phonation tasks using a voice perceptual analysis. METHOD Participants were male students (n = 46 individuals), ranging in age from 13 to 15 years, from a public school in Campinas--SP. Voice samples were recor...

Male courtship displays may be regulated by, and affect the production of, circulating hormones. The Energetics-Hormone Vocalization (EHV) model, for example, posits that interactions among chorusing male anuran amphibians stimulate androgen production that then mediates an increase in vocal effort. Increased vocal effort is expected to deplete energy reserves and increase glucocorticoid levels...

Humans adjust speech amplitude as a function of distance from a listener; we do so in a manner that would compensate for such distance. This ability is presumed to be the product of high-level sociocognitive skills. Nonhuman primates are thought to lack such socially related flexibility in vocal production. Using predictions from a simple arousal-based model whereby vocal feedback from a conspe...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Voice disorders, such as unilateral vocal fold paralysis or paresis, and vocal fold scarring feature structural asymmetries of the vocal folds. Studies on how structural asymmetries affect voice has mostly been limited to computational simulations and experiments on mechanical models. The purpose of the current study is to examine the effects of asymmetries in left-right p...

We conducted a series of reversals to compare the effects of four different treatments on vocal stereotypy emitted by a 7‐year‐old boy with autism. The results showed that (1) the level of vocal stereotypy decreased during exposure to matched stimulation but returned to high levels immediately upon its removal; (2) stereotypy did not significantly decrease during differential reinforcement of o...

Detecting and modeling the engagement of a child during an interaction offers meaningful insights into socio-emotional and cognitive state assessment. Previous work has shown that the engagement level of a child during an interaction with a psychologist can be captured from their vocal behavior. In particular global statistical measures on vocal features computed over an entire interaction were...

Introduction: Laryngeal burns cause long-term voice disorders due to mucosal changes of the vocal folds. Inhalation injuries affect voice production and result in changes in the mucosal thickness and voice quality.   Case Report: A 47-year-old woman was transferred to our department with laryngeal burns sustained during a house fire. On laryngoscopic examination, mucosal waves of both vocal fol...

The sound pressure level of vowels reflects several nonlinguistic and linguistic factors: distance from the speaker, vocal effort, and vowel quality. Increased vocal effort also involves the emphasis of higher frequency components and increases in F0 and F1. This should allow listeners to distinguish it from decreased distance, which does not have these additional effects. It is shown that list...

Most studies of the vocal signs of emotion depend on acted data. This paper reports the development of a vocal coding system to describe the signs of emotion in naturally occurring emotion. The system has been driven by empirical observation, not by a priori assumptions based on acted or laboratory data. The data used to develop it is the Belfast Naturalistic Database. The system takes a multi-...