• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.133-144
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• 2009

Pharyngeal flap surgery changes the space and shape of the oral cavity and vocal tract, and these changing conditions bring resonance change. The purpose of this study was to determine the most reliable and valuable parameters for evaluating hypernasality to distinguish two patients before and after pharyngeal flap surgery. Each patient was asked to clearly speak the vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/ for voice recording. There were nine parameters: Formant (F1, F2, F3), Bandwidth (BW1, BW2, BW3), LPC energy slope ($\Delta$ |A2-A1/F2-F1|), and Band Energy (0-500 Hz, 500-1000 Hz) by each vowel. From the results of discrimination analyses on acoustic parameters, the vowels /a/, /e/ appeared to be insignificant but vowels /i/, /u/, /o/ appeared to be efficient in the separation. A 95%, 100%, and 100% recognition score could be reached when vowels /i/, /u/, and /o/ were analyzed. The results showed that F2, BW3, and LPC slope are more important parameters than the others. Finally, there is a relation between perceptual evaluation score and LPC energy slope of acoustic parameters by least square slope.