Journal of Voice Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 230-239 © 1994 Raven Press, Ltd., New York Relations Between Voice Range Profiles and Physiological and Perceptual Voice Characteristics in Ten-Year-Old Children Anita McAllister, Elisabeth Sederholm, *Johan Sundberg, and ?Patricia Gramming Department of Speech Pathology, Danderyd Hospital, *Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics, Royal Institute of Technology, and ~Department of Phoniatrics, Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden Summary: Pitch and intensity range of 60 children were recorded and plotted in voice range profiles (VRPs). Different aspects were investigated: minimum phonation threshold, pitch range, and maximum dynamic range. Vocal fold status was determined via laryngoscopic examination. Ten percent of the chil- dren had vocal nodules, 23% glottal chinks. Seven voice experts listened to the voices recorded on two separate occasions and rated their properties along 16 parameters including hoarseness. Fourteen percent were rated as hoarse on both recordings and were thus classified as being chronically hoarse. Depar- tures from normal in VRP characteristics were found for children suffering from chronic hoarseness, nodules, and glottal chinks. Children in general seem to have somewhat compressed VRP contours compared with adults, reflecting restricted dynamic vocal capabilities; however, children with mutational voices exhibited an approximation to adult upper VRP contours. Key Words: Voice range profiles--Children's voices--Hoarseness--Glottal chinks--Vocal nodules--Dynamics--Pitch range--Mutation. In recent voice investigations, voice range pro- files (VRPs), also called phonetograms, have been frequently used (1,2). Although the VRP displays only sound pressure level of softest and loudest possible phonation throughout the total pitch range, it has been found informative also with respect to other voice characteristics than those related to dy- namics (3-5). Pabon and Plomp (6) expanded the VRP measurements by including aperiodicity infor- mation and observed that dysphonic voices of var- ious types, apart from aperiodicity characteristics, also frequently exhibited deviant VRP contours. This suggests that it might be worthwhile to exam- Accepted June 21, 1993. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. A. McAI- lister at Department of Speech Pathology, Danderyd Hospital, S-182 88 Danderyd, Sweden. Portions of this investigation were presented at tile Voice Foundation's 21st Annual Symposium in Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A., June 1992. ine the relations between VRP registrations and hoarseness in more detail. Among voice experts, hoarseness is often consid- ered a controversial term, comprising several per- ceptual parameters. Still, according to a previous study, the term was found to be reasonably well defined and unequivocal within a panel of speech and language pathologists (7). We identified three perceptual characteristics of hoarseness: hyper- function, breathiness, and roughness, a result that was in clear accordance with the findings of Isshiki et al. (8). The occurrence of hyperfunctional breathiness has been previously commented on by, e.g., Hammarberg (9). In the past, child hoarseness has sometimes been assumed to be harmless and to automatically disap- pear during puberty (10). However, some authors have taken the opposite view, claiming that by overlooking voice change during childhood, pathol- ogies may be diagnosed attoo late a stage (11). 230