The impact of teacher's dysphonia on children's skills to treat the spoken language

The high prevalence of voice disorders among teachers is known (Roy et al, 2004). Authors
(Morton et al, 2001, Rogerson et al, 2005) have shown the impact of a hoarse voice in
teachers on student performance. Our aim is to analyze how 68 students (mean age: 8 years 5
months) processes dysphonic speech on a language comprehension task (MCQ on a short
story) and on a minimal pair discrimination task (alike/not alike).
Our hypothesis is that student performance will change depending on the modality of the
tasks: dysphonic versus normophonic voice.
Our results: For both the comprehension and the discrimination tasks, the scores of the
students were significantly lower in the dysphonic voice modality (F (1,67) = 11.83, p <0.05)
regardless of gender, the order of voice presentation and type of school. Moreover, we
observe a greater effect of the dysphonic voice modality in the discrimination task (F (1,67) =
9.52, p <0.05). Thus the dysphonic voice disturbs the students the most in the process of
discriminating between two isolated words. recognition of isolated words. Finally, when
children judge the dysphonic voices, their comments are mostly slighting (98.33%).
To conclude, these results support the necessity to prevent voice disorders among teachers
and to create specific voice care programmes.