• Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics
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• v.60 no.7
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• pp.227-231
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• 2017

Purpose: This study aimed to verify the safety of low-dose topiramate on language development in pediatric patients with migraine. Methods: Thirty newly diagnosed pediatric patients with migraine who needed topiramate were enrolled and assessed twice with standard language tests, including the Test of Language Problem Solving Abilities (TOPs), Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test, Urimal Test of Articulation and Phonology, and computerized speech laboratory analysis. Data were collected before treatment, and topiramate as monotherapy was sustained for at least 3 months. The mean follow-up period was $4.3{\pm}2.7months$. The mean topiramate dosage was 0.9 mg/kg/day. Results: The patient's mean age was $144.1{\pm}42.3months$ (male-to-female ratio, 9:21). The values of all the language parameters of the TOPs were not changed significantly after the topiramate treatment as follows: Determine cause, from $15.0{\pm}4.4$ to $15.4{\pm}4.8$ (P>0.05); making inference, from $17.6{\pm}5.6$ to $17.5{\pm}6.6$ (P>0.05); predicting, from $11.5{\pm}4.5$ to $12.3{\pm}4.0$ (P>0.05); and total TOPs score, from $44.1{\pm}13.4$ to $45.3{\pm}13.6$ (P>0.05). The total mean length of utterance in words during the test decreased from $44.1{\pm}13.4$ to $45.3{\pm}13.6$ (P<0.05). The Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test results decreased from $97.7{\pm}22.1$ to $96.3{\pm}19.9months$, and from $81.8{\pm}23.4$ to $82.3{\pm}25.4months$, respectively (P>0.05). In the articulation and phonology validation in both groups, speech pitch and energy were not significant, and all the vowel test results showed no other significant values. Conclusion: No significant difference was found in the language-speaking ability between the patients; however, the number of vocabularies used decreased. Therefore, topiramate should be used cautiously for children with migraine.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.17-21
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• 2005

Purpose : To evaluate the voices of irradiated patients with early glottic carcinoma and to compare these with the voices of healthy volunteers. Materials and Methods : The voice samples (sustained vowel) of seventeen male patients who had been irradiated for T1a glottic squamous carcinoma at least 1 year prior to the study were analyzed with objective voice analyzer (acoustic voice analysis, aerodynamic test, and videostroboscopic analysis) and compared with those of a normal group of twenty age- and sex-matched volunteers. Average fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, and noise-to-harmonic ratio were obtained for acoustic voice analysis. Maximal phonation time, mean flow rate, intensity, subglottic pressure, glottal resistance, glottal efficiency, and glottal power were obtained for aerodynamic test. Results : The irradiated group presented higher values of shimmer in acoustic voice analysis. There was no significant difference between two groups in other parameters. Conclusion : In this study all the objective voice parameters except shimmer were no4 significantly different between the irradiated group and the control group. These results suggest that the voice quality is minimally affected by radiation therapy for 71 a glottic carcinoma.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.45-56
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• 2022

This paper proposes an optimal methodology for automatically diagnosing and predicting the severity of the chronic kidney disease (CKD) using patients' utterances. In patients with CKD, the voice changes due to the weakening of respiratory and laryngeal muscles and vocal fold edema. Previous studies have phonetically analyzed the voices of patients with CKD, but no studies have been conducted to classify the voices of patients. In this paper, the utterances of patients with CKD were classified using the variety of utterance types (sustained vowel, sentence, general sentence), the feature sets [handcrafted features, extended Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (eGeMAPS), CNN extracted features], and the classifiers (SVM, XGBoost). Total of 1,523 utterances which are 3 hours, 26 minutes, and 25 seconds long, are used. F1-score of 0.93 for automatically diagnosing a disease, 0.89 for a 3-classes problem, and 0.84 for a 5-classes problem were achieved. The highest performance was obtained when the combination of general sentence utterances, handcrafted feature set, and XGBoost was used. The result suggests that a general sentence utterance that can reflect all speakers' speech characteristics and an appropriate feature set extracted from there are adequate for the automatic classification of CKD patients' utterances.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.45-51
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• 2023

Voice issues such as voice weakness that arise with age can have social and emotional impacts, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and depression. This study aimed to investigate the changes in acoustic characteristics resulting from aging, focusing on voice quality and spoken fluency. To this end, tasks involving sustained vowel phonation and paragraph reading were recorded for 20 elderly and 20 young participants. Voice-quality-related variables, including F0, jitter, shimmer, and Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) values, were analyzed along with speech-fluency-related variables, such as average syllable duration (ASD), articulation rate (AR), and speech rate (SR). The results showed that in voice quality-related measurements, F0 was higher for the elderly and voice quality was diminished, as indicated by increased jitter, shimmer, and lower CPP levels. Speech fluency analysis also demonstrated that the elderly spoke more slowly, as indicated by all ASD, AR, and SR measurements. Correlation analysis between voice quality and speech fluency showed a significant relationship between shimmer and CPP values and between ASD and SR values. This suggests that changes in spoken fluency can be identified early by measuring the variations in voice quality. This study further highlights the reciprocal relationship between voice quality and spoken fluency, emphasizing that deterioration in one can affect the other.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.49-58
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• 2024

This study aimed to compare the acoustic measurements of speech samples recorded from individuals with normal voices using various devices: the Computerized Speech Lab (CSL), a unidirectional wired pin-microphone (WIRED) suitable for smartphones, the built-in omnidirectional microphone (SMART) of smartphones, and Bluetooth-connected wireless earphones, specifically the Galaxy Buds2 Pro (WIRELESS). This study included 40 normal adults (12 males and 28 females) who had not visited an otolaryngologist for respiratory diseases within the past three months. Participants performed sustained vowel /a/ phonation for four seconds and reading tasks with sentences ("Walk") and paragraphs ("Autumn") in a sound-treated booth. Recordings were simultaneously conducted using the four different devices and synchronized based on the CSL-recorded samples for analysis using the MDVP, ADSV, and VOXplot programs. Compared with CSL, the Cepstral Spectral Index of Dysphonia (CSID_V, CSID_S) and Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) values were lower in the WIRED and higher in the SMART. The opposite trend was observed for the L/H spectral ratios (SR_V and SR_S), and the WIRELESS demonstrated task-specific discrepancies. Furthermore, both the fundamental frequency (F0) and the cepstral peak prominence of the vowel samples (CPP_V) had intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) values above 0.9, indicating high reliability. These variables, F0 and CPP_V were considered highly reliable for voice recordings across different microphone types. However, caution should be exercised when analyzing and interpreting variables such as the SR, CSID, and AVQI, which may be influenced by the type of microphone used.