Effects of hearing loss on the voice in children.

The object of this paper is to report on preliminary acoustic characteristics obtained from a group of 10 to 12 year old males from special institution from Zagreb with more than mild sensorineural hearing losses. The study was structured as an investigation of voice and resonance characteristics of Croatian children with and without sensorineural hearing loss, using sustained phonation of the vowel /a/ which was recorded using a high-quality tape recorder carried out by two voice clinicians. The samples were digitized and analyzed for frequency and spectral characteristics by EZVoice and Bruel & Kjaer Real-time Frequency Analyzer and high quality sound level meter (mouth-to-microphone distance = 30 cm). Differences were observed in perturbation measures; F0 variability; vocal intensity. Spectral deviations were also observed. Discussion focuses on application of these findings by Croatian speech and hearing specialists with the hearing impaired population. Results indicated the following: measures of jitter were significantly elevated in the hearing loss group as compared to the normal controls. A similar result was observed for measures of shimmer. Lack of voice professional's awareness of importance for making pleasant voice quality of hearing-impaired individuals was the initial idea of this study. Patients with hearing losses have been reported to show a wide variety of voice disturbances.