A Comparative Study of Glottal Data from Normal Adults Using Two Laryngographs

A laryngograph was developed to measure the open and closed movements of vocal folds in our laboratory. This study attempted to evaluate its performance by comparing its glottal data with that of the original laryngograph. Ten normal Korean adults Participated in the experiment. Each subject produced a sustained vowel /a/ for about five seconds. This study compared f0 values, contact quotients of the duration of closed vocal folds over one glottal pulse, and area quotients of the closed over open vocal folds derived from glottal waves using both the original and new laryngographs. Results showed that the mean and standard deviation of the two laryngographs were almost comparable with a correlation coefficient 0.662 but minor systematic shift below those of the original laryngograph was observed. The absolute mean difference converged into 1 Hz, which indicates a possibility of adopting some threshold of rejecting inappropriate pitch values beyond a threshold value. The contact quotient of the normal subjects came out slightly over the 50% in a citation speech. Finally, the area quotient converged into 1. We will pursue further studies on the abnormal patients in the future.