title: Effects of spectral content on Horii Oral-Nasal Coupling scores in children.
abstract: A miniature accelerometer and microphone can be used to obtain Horii Oral-Nasal Coupling (HONC) scores to objectively measure nasalization of speech. While this instrumentation compares favorably in terms of size and cost relative to other objective measures of nasality, the metric has not been well characterized in children. Furthermore, the measure is known to be affected by vowel loading, as speech loaded with "high" vowels is consistently scored as more nasal than speech loaded with "low" vowels. Filtering the signals used in computation of the HONC score to better isolate the correlates of nasalization has been shown to reduce vowel-related effects on the metric, but the efficacy of filtering has thus far only been explored in adults. Here, HONC scores for running speech and the vowel portions of consonant-vowel-consonant tokens were calculated for the speech of 26 children, aged 4-9 yrs. Scores were computed using the broadband accelerometer and speech signals, as well as using filtered, low-frequency versions of these signals. HONC scores obtained using both broadband and filtered signals resulted in well-separated scores for nasal and non-nasal speech. HONC scores computed using filtered signals were found to exhibit less within-participant variability.
authors.affiliation: Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, Boston University, 677 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
authors.forename: Lenny A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Varghese
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
authors.forename: Joseph O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Mendoza
authors.affiliation: Department of Surgery, Division of Otolaryngology, University of Wisconsin, Voice and Swallow Clinics, 1675 Highland Avenue, Mailcode C225, Madison, Wisconsin 53792.
authors.forename: Maia N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Braden
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University, 635 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215.
authors.forename: Cara E
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Stepp
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics / Q000295:instrumentation; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009055:Mouth / Q000502:physiology*; D009666:Nose / Q000502:physiology*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014159:Transducers; D014833:Voice Quality