The purpose of this study was to analyze the prevalence of vocal nodules and to identify factors related with an increased risk for vocal nodules.This study was conducted using data from the Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2008 to 2011. The subjects consisted of 19,636 men and women aged ≥19 years. Related factors such as age, marital status, incomes, and education level...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed (1) to investigate music theory teachers' professional and extra-professional vocal loading and background noise exposure, (2) to determine the correlation between vocal loading and background noise, and (3) to determine the correlation between vocal loading and self-evaluation data. METHODS Using voice dosimetry, 13 music theory teachers were monitored for one wor...

The variable vocal behavior of human infants is the scaffolding upon which speech and social interactions develop. It is important to know what factors drive this developmentally critical behavioral output. Using marmoset monkeys as a model system, we first addressed whether the initial conditions for vocal output and its sequential structure are perinatally influenced. Using dizygotic twins an...

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in prosodic abilities, both pragmatic and affective. Their deficiencies in affective prosody have been mostly related to cognitive difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study tested an alternative hypothesis, linking vocal emotion recognition difficulties in ASD to lower level auditory perceptual deficiencies. Twenty ...

In this paper we address two questions about dominance in the AMI-IDIAP scenario meetings: (i) do the annotated most and least dominant utterances correlate with different levels of vocal effort? and if so (ii) how quantitatively discriminative are the vocal effort effects for prosody, voice quality and low level acoustic features? For answering these questions we perform supervised learning wi...

Comparative analyses of the roar vocalization of male harbor seals from ten sites throughout their distribution showed that vocal variation occurs at the oceanic, regional, population, and subpopulation level. Genetic barriers based on the physical distance between harbor seal populations present a likely explanation for some of the observed vocal variation. However, site-specific vocal variati...

Manual generation of vocal speech user interfaces requires effort in different disciplines. This includes designing the interaction between a user and the system, configuring toolkits for speech input and output of the user interface, and setting up a dialogue manager for the behavior of the user interface. It requires even more effort if the user interfaces have to be created for several platf...