IMPACT OF TEACHERS’ VOICE QUALITY ON CHILDREN’S LANGUAGE

Teachers are a professional group highly exposed to dysphonia, the accumulation of a high vocal demand and detrimental working environments are auspicious to the development of vocal disorders. Yet, the voice of a teacher is his main tool for conveying knowledge to his students, thus a teacher’s voice is of highest value. Recent studies have shown that altered vocal quality have an adverse impact
on listeners’ speech processing skills. The objective of our study was to investigate the impact of dysphonic voice on the speech processing skills of 68 eight-year-old children on a text comprehension task and on a minimal pair discrimination task. Children were tested preliminarily according to their auditory attention skills and their lexical and phrasal skills. Children listened to a female voice that read a text and a list of minimal pairs first in a normal voice and then in a dysphonic voice. Their comprehension of the text was evaluated by their score at seven questions about the text and their discrimination score was defined according to the number of correctly
discriminated pairs. Results show that dysphonic voice quality lowers the score of all children, regardless of age, gender or language processing skills and across both tasks (p < 0,05); the negative effect of the dysphonic voice quality is more marked on the discrimination task (p < 0,05). The results of this study clearly advocate for the prevention of voice disorders in teachers