Vowel Selection and Its Effects on Perturbation and Nonlinear Dynamic Measures

Abstract

<i>Objective:</i> Acoustic analysis of voice is typically conducted on recordings of sustained vowel phonation. This study applied perturbation and nonlinear dynamic analyses to the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/ in order to determine vowel selection effects on analysis. <i>Patients and Methods:</i> Forty subjects (20 males and 20 females) with normal voices participated in recording. Traditional parameters of fundamental frequency, signal-to-noise ratio, percent jitter, and percent shimmer were calculated for the signals using CSpeech. Nonlinear dynamic parameters of correlation dimension and second-order entropy were also calculated. <i>Results:</i> Perturbation analysis results were largely incongruous in this study and in previous research. Fundamental frequency results corroborated previous work, indicating higher fundamental frequency for /i/ and /u/ and lower fundamental frequency for /a/. Signal-to-noise ratio results showed that /i/ and /u/ have greater harmonic levels than /a/. Results of nonlinear dynamic analysis suggested that more complex activity may be evident in /a/ than in /i/ or /u/. <i>Conclusion:</i> Percent jitter and percent shimmer may not be useful for description of acoustic differences between vowels. Fundamental frequency, signal-to-noise ratio, and nonlinear dynamic parameters may be applied to characterize /a/ as having lower frequency, higher noise, and greater nonlinear components than /i/ and /u/.