Ideal time of sonorous tongue vibration of dysphonic children

Abstract

Purpose: verify the ideal time of the sonorous tongue vibration exercise (STVE) in the voice of dysphonic children. Method: participated twenty-seven children, from four to 11 years, diagnosed with nodules or cysts of vocal folds. Eleven children were part of the experimental group (GE) and 16 were part of the control group (GC). A sustained vowel /ε/ and count one to 10 were recorded before (m0) and after the first (m1), third (m3), fifth (m5) and the seventh (m7) minute of execution of the STVE. The recordings have been presented to three speech therapists that judged whether there was change in voice quality. The acoustic parameters evaluated in sustained vowel were fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, glottal to noise excitation (GNE) and noise. Results: there were no significant changes in the auditory perception evaluation between the moments of STVE execution. In the acoustic analysis, it was observed that the noise parameter decreased and the GNE parameter increased after three minutes of performing the exercise in GE, compared to the GC. Conclusion: there was no improvement in any of the times in the auditory perceptual analysis in the voice of dysphonic children with the STVE. The acoustic analysis indicated improvement in vocal quality in the third minute of exercise performance.