Perceptive evaluation of the severity of dysphonia among Lebanese bilingual subjects

Abstract

<p class="abstract"><strong>Background:</strong> Perceptive analysis of voice represents a basic and fundamental early step in the process of evaluating voice quality. Several factors seem to affect the results. Prominent among them is bilingualism, a common occurrence among Lebanese youths who frequently speak a second or third language in addition to their native tongue Arabic.</p><p class="abstract"><strong>Methods:</strong> This study aims to find pertinent information for the characterization of the severity of dysphonia depending on the language spoken by Lebanese bilingual subjects. The intent is to try to appreciate if voice seems more dysphonic in the Lebanese language compared to French and English. The sample comprises twenty-two Lebanese dysphonic women, aged between twenty and sixty years. They all read a text in Lebanese Arabic and another one in French or in English, depending on the languages that they use on a regular basis. Voice recordings are rated by four expert listeners. Two listening sessions are organized using the G, R and B criteria of Hirano’s GRBAS scale. </p><p class="abstract"><strong>Results:</strong> Results show that the voice appears more dysphonic with a more pronounced roughness when reading in French for bilingual French/Arabic subjects than it is for English/Arabic persons reading in English. However, the patients speaking French and Arabic appear to be more dysphonic as a group compared to the patients speaking English and Arabic.</p><p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><strong>Conclusions:</strong> It is important to enlarge the number of participants to get more accurate results. However, the suggested corpus in Lebanese Arabic seems to be adapted for the evaluation of voice quality.</p>