Acoustic and perceptual analysis of vocal dysfunction

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the usefulness of structuring perceptual voice characterizing categories by factor analysis and to provide data for a combined acoustic—perceptual evaluation of the vocal dysfunction. A set of normal and pathological voices representing various voice disorders were presented to a jury of voice clinicians who evaluated the voices on a five-point scale for each of 26 voice describing parameters. Factor analysis of the pathological subgroup of 26 voices revealed five bipolar factors accounting for 66% of the total variance. Significant correlations were found between three of these factors and acoustic data extracted from long-time average spectra, fundamental frequency distribution analysis and frequency perturbation. Also, some of the individual voice characterizing parameters correlated significantly with acoustic data.