Daniel R. Boone

Speech rate and syntactic complexity effects on the auditory comprehension of alzheimer patients

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effects of speech rate and syntactic complexity on the auditory language comprehension of individuals with presumptive Alzheimers disease, compared to healthy elderly controls. Three presentation rates and command statements of increasing syntactic complexity were used. Although rate of presentation did not significantly affect comprehension in either group, both groups demonstrated increased difficulty with stimuli of greater syntactic complexity, with Alzheimers patients performing significantly poorer at all levels.

A view of age‐related changes in language function

The purpose of this report is to describe an investigation of possible aging effects on neurolinguistic task performance in a study of the effects of age‐related dementing illness on communication. Ten healthy normal individuals, controlled for intelligence and education, from each decade of life from the third to the eighth were given the following five neurolinguistic measures: Sentence Correction task, Verbal Description Test, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test‐Revised, Sentence Disambiguation task, and Pragmatics task. Frequency distributions of subject performance scores were developed for each measure and, where appropriate, analysis of variance was used to evaluate aging effects. Results of the study demonstrate that age‐related decline in linguistic competency cannot be assumed and age effects, when present, may not take the form of an across‐the‐decades decline.

Supraglottic contribution to voice quality

Summary Although there has been continuing interest in voice quality, much of this research has focused on the vocal folds rather than the supraglottal structures. This paper reports the use of videoendoscopy for studying supraglottal participation in various singing tasks. In a preliminary study presented last year by the present authors, CT scanning was used to corroborate videoendoscopic observation. Vocal tract activities observed included variation of laryngeal height with pitch, variation of pharyngeal wall dimension with pitch and vowel, and marked supraglottic constriction with certain vocal imitations. In order to gain a better understanding of vocal training, and its effect upon vocal tract physiology, a study was designed using videoendoscopy to observe singers with significant experience and training while performing various vocal tasks. The tasks focused on the following: (1) vocal tract activity associated with pitch changes; (2) the physiology involved in the production of “cover”; (3) the structures involved in the production of vibrato; and (4) the physiology of the singers “ring.” It would appear that videoendoscopy will become increasingly more valuable to the voice community as our understanding of vocal tract physiology improves.

The singing/acting voice in the mature adult

With years of training and performance, the mature vocal performer experiences less vocal changes with aging than does his/her age peer who is not a performer. We have considered, some physical problems that may adversely influence the voice of the older performer. With some awareness and effective management of these possible problems, the negative effects on the older performers voice can be minimized.

Respiratory training in voice therapy

Summary Many patients with dysphonia do not need to modify their respiratory patterns. For those that do, a simple four-point program is offered that will usually aid the patient in developing better expiration control. First, the patient is instructed that inspiratory-expiratory respiration is a continuous ongoing movement. Imagery is used to show that there is little or no discernible gap between inspiration-expiration. The patient begins working on expiratory control by prolonging phonation with no instruction given for “taking in” a breath. The patients task is to prolong a sound with no discernible inspiratory effort before the sound is made. The patient is then asked to match a verbal target model, making no special effort to take in a breath before producing the model. Finally, instruction is given in developing skills to take renewed breaths (catch-up breaths) when saying or singing an utterance

Expanding Perspectives in Care of the Speaking Voice

Summary The effective voice clinician has always had to borrow from various disciplines: voice science, otolaryngology, psychology, and speech-language pathology. Such eclecticism requires, however, that the clinician integrate the perspectives of these various disciplines into some kind of theoretical clinical bias. One bias might be that with greater use of instrumentation in voice therapy, the voice clinician must not substitute data collection for attending to the feelings of the patient. By using the clinical input from various disciplines, for example, voice clinicians might develop a useful clinical perspective that vocal hyperfunction is one of the primary causes of many voice disorders. Consequently, from such a clinical view might come a treatment perspective that can clearly define the problem (too much effort while speaking) and offer a rationale for voice remediation.