The Effect of CAPE-V Sentences on Cepstral/Spectral Acoustic Measures in Dysphonic Speakers

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the effect of connected speech stimuli from the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V) on cepstral/spectral acoustic measurements. Patients and Methods: Recordings from 20 participants seeking treatment for dysphonia were analyzed in this study. The participants read the 6 sentence stimuli from the CAPE-V at a comfortable pitch and loudness. Acoustic measures of cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and its standard deviation, the low-to-high spectral ratio and its standard deviation (LH and LHsd) and the multiparametric measure Cepstral Spectral Index of Dysphonia were acquired from each sentence recording and applied to analyses. Results: A significant main effect for sentence type was present on the measurements of CPP, LH and LHsd. Post hoc pairwise comparisons revealed the most robust effect on CPP from the all-voiced sentence ‘We were away a year ago'. For the measures of LH and LHsd, sentence effects were significant for the majority of comparisons. Conclusion: The connected speech stimuli from the CAPE-V affected cepstral/spectral acoustic measurements differentially. These findings support the rationale for using the various CAPE-V stimuli during clinical assessment, and indicate the need for further investigations to inform clinical practice.