Phonetic considerations in the design of voice assessment material

Abstract

A read text is commonly used in voice clinics for auditory perceptual evaluation of dysphonic voices and acoustic analysis. This paper examines the phonetic make-up of texts in several European languages to investigate their comparability in the frameworks of international, multi-lingual clinical studies, and the need for outcome measures in evidence-based practice. The preliminary work described investigates the complex notion of phonetic balancing. It shows that, despite very different phoneme inventories, certain similarities of sound-type usage appear cross-linguistically. Although this high level analysis is of interest and of potential practical use, because of linguistic and speaker-dependent contextual variation, more fine-grained phonetic and acoustic analyses are needed.