Ingrid Verduyckt

Personality Traits of Children With Vocal Fold Nodules

This is a case-control study investigating the personality profiles of children with vocal fold nodules (VFNs). Personality has been suggested as a contributing factor to VFN in adults and in children. However, previous studies in children have focused on psychopathologic traits and have reported contradictory findings. The aim of our study was to explore whether general, nonpathologic personality structure predicts the presence of VFN in children. Personality traits were measured in 34 children with VFN, aged 6.0-13.6, and 34 age- and sex-matched normophonic controls by means of a pediatric five-factor personality questionnaire. Children with VFN were found to be significantly more extroverted than controls (P = 0.022, d = 0.61), and a binary logistic regression showed that extraversion significantly predicted the presence of VFN in our population (P = 0.027). The clinical implications of the results are discussed.

Noisy voice or voice in noise: Evaluation of cognitive load on the speaker, work in progress

We are comparing the cognitive load induced by various types of noise in the processing of information from speech. We examine if there is a difference in cognitive load between external noise sources (background noise) and internal noise sources (dysphonic voice). Our hypothesis is that noisy voices could be more cognitively demanding than background noise because they are more similar to the target signal spatially and temporally and the perceived link with the target signal is stronger. 60 normal hearing subjects (18-30 years) listen to texts in ten different conditions: (1) Healthy voice in multitalker babble noise, (2-4) Three types of dysphonic voices in background noise, (5-7) Three dysphonic voices in silence, (8) Healthy voice in silence, (9) Healthy voice with omnidirectional noise equivalent to dysphonic noise, (10) Healthy voice with dysphonic noise from same direction. We evaluate cognitive load in 4 ways: (1) during the listening phase by subjects’ performance on a secondary graphic task, (2...

Equivalência cultural da versão brasileira do Questionnaire des Symptômes Vocaux

Purpose This article aims to present the cultural equivalence of the Brazilian version of the ‘Questionnaire des Symptomes Vocaux’ (QSV). Methods The questionnaire was translated into Portuguese by two Brazilian bilingual speech-language pathologists who were informed about the purpose of this research. The back translation was performed by a third bilingual Brazilian speech-language pathologist, who was also a French teacher and had not participated in the previous stage. After the comparison of translations, a final version of the questionnaire was produced and called ‘Questionario de Sintomas Vocais Pediatrico (QSV-P)’, which was administered to 32 individuals (16 children/adolescents with vocal complaints and their parents). The inclusion criterion was the vocal complaint and/or vocal quality altered on the perceptual auditory evaluation. The option “not applicable” was added to each item of the protocol. Results During the process of translation and cultural adaptation, no item was changed and/or eliminated from the questions. The QSV-P kept the same structure as the original French version with 31 questions, which can be responded by children/adolescents (6-18 years) and their parents, regarding the physical, emotional and social functioning of the vocal problem. Conclusion The cultural equivalence of the Brazilian version of the ‘Questionnaire des Symptomes Vocaux’, entitled ‘Questionario de Sintomas Vocais Pediatrico’, was demonstrated. The QSV-P validation is currently being done.