Our Research Lab
Voice Quality Pediatrics
Understanding Pediatric Dysphonia
Medical advances have led to the ability to increase the viability of newborns who are impacted by a wide variety of disorders, syndromes, and structural anomalies. Unfortunately, this often involves chronic intubation which can lead to permanent alteration of the systems used to produce voice. Remarkably, there are almost no laboratory studies of voice quality in pediatric patients. Indeed, most of the available knowledge has been adopted from studies of adult voice or has been obtained through clinical studies rather than parametric and theoretically motiviated laboratory studies of pediatric voice quality.
We have partnered with pediatric voice experts at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), Miami University (Ohio), and the University of Georgia to expand our voice quality research to pediatric populations including those with typical laryngeal voicing (based on vocal fold vibration) and those with alaryngeal voicing (volitional vibration of structures above the vocal folds to produce voice). This new collaboration promises to yield many discoveries over the next decade or so.
