THE PERCEPTUAL STRUCTURE OF PATHOLOGICAL VOICE QUALITY

Although perceptual assessment is included in most protocols for evalu ating pathologic voices, a standard set of valid scales for measuring voice quality has never been established. Standardization is important for theory and for clinical acceptance, and also because validation o f objective measures of voice depends on valid perceptual measures. Th e present study used large sets (n=80) of male and female voices, repr esenting a broad range of diagnoses and vocal severities. Eight expert s judged the dissimilarity of each pair of voices, and responses were analyzed using nonmetric individual differences multidimensional scali ng. Results indicate that differences between listeners in perceptual strategy are so great that the fundamental assumption of a common perc eptual space must be questioned. Because standardization depends on th e assumption that listeners are similar, it is concluded that efforts to standardize perceptual labels for voice quality are unlikely to suc ceed. However, analysis by synthesis may provide an alternate means of modeling quality as a function of both voices and listeners, thus avo iding this problem. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of America.