For successful performance of phonosurgery, it is most important to maintain the flexibility of the vocal fold. Unfortunately, however, there has been no direct effective method so far for assessing the flexibility of the vocal fold membrane. If the vocal fold surface showed any abnormal region where good vibration could not be observed, reduced flexibility was expected in this area. Hitherto, ...

Over the 8-year period 1971--1978, 743 benign lesions of the larynx, of which 551 were pseudotumors and 192 were benign neoplasms, were surgically treated at Groote Schuur Hospital. In comparison, during the same period 402 malignant tumours of the larynx were also seen. The commonest benign lesions were vocal cord nodules, almost exclusively found in women, and the vocal cord polyp, predominan...

This research investigated the role of person familiarity in the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to recognize emotional expressions. Infants (N = 72) were presented simultaneously with two filmed facial expressions, happy and sad, accompanied by a single vocal expression that was concordant with one of the two facial expressions. Infants' looking preferences and facial expressions were coded. ...

This study on common marmosets Callithrix jacchus is the first to examine noise-dependent mechanisms of vocal plasticity in a New World monkey. Since acoustic communication can be considerably impaired by environmental noise, some animals have evolved adaptations to counteract its masking effects. The studied marmosets increased the sound level of their spontaneous calls in response to increase...

IMPORTANCE Vocal polyps are common exophytic laryngeal lesions that usually necessitate microscopic laryngeal surgery under general anesthesia. Office-based indirect laryngoscopic procedures provide an alternative management option and can be performed comfortably under flexible endoscopic guidance. Combining angiolytic potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP) laser treatment and flexible endoscopic p...

Vocal fold tissue lesions such as nodules and polyps are thought to develop in response to mechanical stress that occurs during vocal fold collision. Two computational models of vocal fold collision during voice production are used to investigate this hypothesis. A one-dimensional lumped mass model, whose parameters are derived from vocal fold tissue dimensions and material properties, predicts...

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of manual sign mand training combined with prompt delay and vocal prompting on the production of vocal responses in nonvocal children with developmental disabilities. A multiple baseline design across participants verified the effectiveness of this intervention. All participants showed increases in vocal responses following the implementatio...

Although female mammal vocal behaviour is known to advertise fertility, to date, no non-human mammal study has shown that the acoustic structure of female calls varies significantly around their fertile period. Here, we used a combination of hormone measurements and acoustic analyses to determine whether female giant panda chirps have the potential to signal the caller's precise oestrous stage ...

The "new math" curriculum, one version of which was developed in the 1950s and 1960s by the School Mathematics Study Group under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, occasioned a great deal of controversy among mathematicians. Well before its rejection by parents and teachers, some mathematicians were vocal critics, decrying the new curriculum because of the way it described the pra...