The Perception of Breathiness in the Voices of Pediatric Speakers.
Lisa M Kopf, Mark D Skowronski, Supraja Anand and 2 others
PMID 29162356WHAT IT FOUND
Six listeners matched breathiness consistently in synthesized child vowels, and their judgments tracked the breathiness changes made to the voices.
For these child samples, breathiness perception did not depend strongly on pitch height, unlike adult voices.
Key findings
01Increasing the breathiness parameters of the synthesized child vowels made listeners judge them as more breathy, while the child talker did not significantly affect the judgments.
02The breathiness matching task showed high repeatability within each listener and moderately high agreement across listeners.
03For the pediatric synthesized vowels, loudness ratio, pitch strength, and cepstral peak each tracked perceived breathiness strongly, and adding fundamental frequency did not improve these pediatric models.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only six listeners took part, all female students with a mean age of 20 years, so the judgments may not represent clinicians or other listener groups. The child voices came from only four speakers aged 3.0 to 4.0 years, and the stimuli were synthesized rather than natural recordings from children with voice disorders. The study did not test diagnosis, severity, treatment outcomes, or real patients, so it cannot show that these measures improve clinical care. One child voice had a synthesis error that made the first two breathiness steps smaller than intended. The adult comparison used different listeners and a different data set, so child-adult differences are not a controlled clinical comparison. The authors note that random sampling and much larger set sizes would be needed to determine actual population differences.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat loudness ratio, pitch strength, or cepstral peak as validated clinical tests for children's voice disorders. This study used six listeners and 20 synthesized vowels from four young children, not natural voice samples from children with voice disorders, and it did not test diagnosis or treatment.