Spectral, cepstral, and short-term acoustic measures in women with and without laryngeal and vocal alterations.
Amanda Mariane Paulino Gualberto, Fabiana Andrade Penido, Ana Cristina Côrtes Gama
Women with laryngeal lesions had significantly higher jitter, shimmer, and spectral tilt, and lower HNR, GNE, and HF noise than women without lesions.
Several differences were large enough to matter clinically. Connected speech added information beyond the sustained vowel for some measures.
Key findings
1Women with laryngeal alterations had significantly lower GNE, HNR, CPPS (speech), and HF noise (vowel and speech), and significantly higher jitter, shimmer, and spectral tilt (speech) than women without laryngeal alterations.
2Large effect sizes were found for shimmer and HNR (vowel), CPPS and spectral tilt (speech), and HF noise (vowel and speech), meaning the group differences were not just statistically significant but also of meaningful magnitude.
3In the comparison of women with versus without perceptual vocal deviation, all acoustic measures differed significantly except CPPS (vowel) and spectral tilt (vowel and speech). H1-H2 was significant in this comparison but not in the laryngeal-alteration comparison.
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What it does not show
Convenience sample: the 69 teachers were those who happened to meet the clinical, vocal, and laryngeal criteria at one occupational health service, not a random or probability sample. The laryngeal-alteration group mixed four different lesion types (nodules, polyps, cysts, glottal chinks), so the findings describe a heterogeneous group and cannot be attributed to any single diagnosis. All participants were women, aged 22 to 44, from one state school system in Brazil. The results cannot be assumed to apply to men, to other age groups, or to other populations. Cross-sectional design: voices were recorded once. There is no information about whether the acoustic pattern changes over time or in response to treatment. The laryngeal-alteration group was small (n = 21), and the authors themselves call for larger and more balanced samples in future work.
Declared interests
Funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, grant 304475/2023-8). No industry sponsor, no author disclosures of financial ties to a voice-assessment company or software vendor.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the significant group differences as a validated diagnostic test for a specific laryngeal condition. The altered group combined nodules, polyps, cysts, and glottal chinks, and the study compared group means rather than establishing individual diagnostic cutoffs or sensitivity and specificity for any single measure.
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