Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Objectives: The aim of this work was to determine, by computing quantitative parameters over the recording of complete spoken sentences, female human voices obtained from dysphonic individuals. Healthy subjects were also recruited to compute reference values. Materials and Methods: In this study, a total of 15 female subjects who were diagnosed with dysphonia were enrolled. Age matched female controls were also enrolled. Each subject was asked to read aloud a text composed of three sentences. The subjects were all Italian native speakers and the sentences were written in Italian.Voice was digitally recorded and each sentence was processed by Praat software in order to compute frequency parameters (Pitch, Jitter, Shimmer) and harmonic to noise ratio. Parameters were then compared within the sentences spoken by the same subject and between pathological and control group. Results: The parameters resulted similar among the three sentences read by the same subject, while there were statistically significant differences between the pathological group and the control group. Conclusion: The quantitative analysis of voice, run over complete sentences, is therefore able to characterize pathological subjects and provides useful information that may support the diagnosis of dysphonia.Processing voices from a control group allowed also to develop reference data for female human voice. The found values can be assumed as representative of the normal female voice and may be used as reference data for other studies on pathological voices.
Ancillao et al. (Tue,) studied this question.