Voice characteristics and overall severity of a voice disorder

What is it about?

Speech-language pathologists describe how an individual’s voice sounds using characteristics such as breathiness, roughness, strain, pitch, and loudness. Understanding how listeners use these characteristics to judge the severity of a voice disorder (dysphonia) helps determine if one or some of the voice characteristics is/are weighed more heavily when determining the severity of the voice disorder. It turns out the voice characteristics that were used were slightly different depending on the sex of the speaker and the kind of scale the listener used to make the judgement.

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Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Understanding which voice characteristics lead to a voice disorder sounding more severe or less severe helps speech-language pathologists select voice targets in voice therapy sessions. It also helps us understand what about a voice is being described when a voice is characterized as mildly, moderately, or severely disordered (dysphonic).