Acoustic measure of fundamental frequency during three speech tasks in vocally healthy children

Abstract

The present study examined the fundamental frequency (F0) during three speech tasks in a group of vocally healthy children. The study also compared the reliability of different speech tasks for eliciting F0. Fifty-six vocally healthy children (31 boys and 25 girls) between the ages of 7.0 and 10.11 years participated in this study. Each child completed three speech tasks used to elicit a voice sample for subsequent analysis of fundamental frequency (F0). The tasks included: (a) sustained vowel /a/ prolongation, (b) repeating a sentence, and (c) reading aloud a passage. Two types of reliability, between-trial and between-day reliability, were compared across speech tasks. Results revealed significant difference in F0 between the three speech tasks (p = 0.01). Post hoc comparisons revealed that vowel task elicited significantly higher F0 values than the passage task. Passage reading task yielded the highest intra-class correlation coefficient values for both between-trial and between-day reliability. The results provide some empirical data for standardizing voice assessment protocol for school-age children.