The Relationship Between Auditory Perceptual Evaluation and Acoustic Measurements of the Voice in Dysphonia: Some Issues About the Task Effect on Perceptual Rating

Abstract

Introduction: This study aimed to investigate construct convergent validity of the Persian version of consensus auditory perceptual evaluation of voice (called ATSHA), using the acoustic measurements. Moreover, the effect of voice tasks on the perceptual ratings was studied. Materials and Methods: The study data were gathered from a total of 40 dysphonic patients (Mean±SD age=36.79±8.26 years). Perceptual voice evaluation was performed using the ATSHA during sustained vowels and sentence reading tasks. The acoustic features including fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, jitter, shimmer, and Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio (HNR) were extracted using Praat application. To assess construct validity of ATSHA, correlation between perceptual and acoustic measures were studied. The effect of tasks was investigated by mean comparison and Pearson correlation. Results: The results demonstrate that ATSHA has significant correlation with all acoustic measures except the frequency (r=-0.08-0.35; P≥0.05). There was no significant correlation between pitch and the acoustic measures of intensity and jitter (r=-0.31; P=0.05 and r=0.24; P=0.14, respectively). The highest correlation observed between the overall severity and the HNR (r=-0.85; P<0.001). The correlation between the perceptual scores in both tasks was high (r=0.82-0.99, P<0.05). Conclusion: The ATSHA is a valid scale for perceptual judgment on intensity, jitter, shimmer, and HNR. However, this scale could not estimate the frequency of voice in dysphonia. The current study demonstrate that vowel prolongation and sentence reading has no noticeable effect on the perceptual ratings in dysphonia.

Keywords

• Auditory perception
• Acoustic
• Voice
• Dysphonia