Investigation of the Relationship Between Vocal Fatigue, Quality of Life, and Compliance With Vocal Hygiene in Professional Voice Users

PURPOSE

Intensive voice use may lead to the development of voice disorders or voice complaints, such as vocal fatigue, for professional voice users (teachers, academics, call center workers, actors, singers, speech and language therapists, voice trainers, and religious officials). Vocal fatigue has a detrimental effect on occupational, emotional, and social performance, besides the quality of life of the individual. The effect of voice hygiene interventions on voice fatigue is not fully known. The results of studies conducted with different occupational groups are inconsistent. The present study aims to analyze the relationship between vocal fatigue and voice-related quality of life (V-RQOL) in professional voice users, and the impact of vocal hygiene on vocal fatigue.

METHODS

Participants (24 male, 90 female), who were professional voice users without any diagnosis of voice disorders or voice complaints were divided into two groups low vocal hygiene compliance (LVH; n = 66) and high vocal hygiene compliance (HVH; n = 48). In this study, vocal fatigue was measured by the vocal fatigue index (VFI), and V-RQOL was measured by the voice handicap index (VHI-10) and V-RQOL.

RESULTS

VFI subscales (tiredness, avoidance, physical discomfort) have a moderate positive correlation with VHI-10 and V-RQOL, which indicates that there is a significant relationship between vocal fatigue and quality of life amongst professional voice users. While there was no significant difference between the LVH and HVH groups in terms of quality of life, it was found that the vocal fatigue level of the LVH group was higher.

CONCLUSION

This study of professional voice users with healthy voices reveals a relationship between vocal fatigue and V-RQOL. Vocal hygiene compliance may affect professional voice users' vocal fatigue symptoms; the low-compliant group has higher levels of tiredness, avoidance, and physical discomfort. The findings highlight the importance of raising awareness of the problems of professional voice users, even though they have healthy voices and the need for vocal hygiene education programs that target them.

Evaluation of Immediate Effects of Straw Phonation Exercise and Determination of the Ideal Performance Time in Healthy Adults

PURPOSE

The ideal performance time of straw phonation exercise, one of the semi-occluded vocal tract exercise types, in which optimal effects are seen in healthy voices is still unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the immediate effect of straw phonation exercise in healthy adults after 1, 3, 5, 7, and 10 minutes, considering: acoustic parameters, electroglottographic parameters, auditory-perceptual general voice quality, the participants' self-assessment regarding vocal effort, and laryngeal discomfort during exercise.

METHODS

This study included 69 participants (35 women, 34 men) with a healthy voice. Participants performed the exercise with straw for a total of 10 minutes. The data were collected before (m0) and immediately after exercises at the first (m1), third (m3), fifth (m5), seventh (m7), and tenth (m10) minutes of performance using sustained emission of vowel /a/ and a sentence.

RESULTS

There was an increase in the fundamental frequency at m7 and a decrease in the shimmer from m5 in men. The sound pressure level increased at m5 and m10 in women and from m1 in men. The Acoustic Voice Quality Index score decreased at m5 in men. The mean average closed quotient decreased at m10 in women. Auditory-perceptual general voice quality was optimal at m3 in women and at m5 in men, it deteriorated at m7 in women and at m10 in men. The vocal effort during the exercise increased at m7 in women and at m10 in men. The laryngeal discomfort during the exercise increased for both sexes at m10.

CONCLUSIONS

The straw phonation exercise in healthy individuals promoted optimal effects on voice quality after 5 and 7 minutes for men and 3 and 5 minutes for women. Prolongation of the exercise time causes negative effects on voice quality and an increase in vocal effort and laryngeal discomfort presented by the participants.

Taxonomically-related Word Pairs Evoke both N400 and LPC at Long SOA in Turkish

Semantic priming in Turkish was examined in 36 right-handed healthy participants in a delayed lexical decision task via taxonomic relations using EEG. Prime-target relations included related- unrelated- and pseudo-words. Taxonomically related words at long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were shown to modulate N400 and late positive component (LPC) amplitudes. N400 semantic priming effect in the time window of 300-500 ms was the largest for pseudo-words, intermediate for semantically-unrelated targets, and smallest for semantically-related targets as a reflection of lexical-semantic retrieval. This finding contributes to the ERP literature showing how remarkably universal the N400 brain potential is, with similar effects across languages and orthography. The ERP data also revealed different influences of related, unrelated, and pseudo-word conditions on the amplitude of the LPC. Attention scores and mean LPC amplitudes of related words in parietal region showed a moderate correlation, indicating LPC may be related to "relationship-detection process".