Statistical Analysis of Acoustical Parameters in the Voice of Children with Juvenile Dysphonia

The goal of this research is to answer the question: is it necessary to build a completely different system in order to automatically recognize functional dysphonia (FD) in children's cases or is it possible to train the system with healthy and pathological voices of adults? For this reason preliminary statistical analyses were carried out between healthy and functional dysphonia voices of children and healthy children voices with healthy adults'. The statistical analyses draw the conclusion that variations of Jitter and Shimmer values with Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio (HNR) and the first component of the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC1) are good indicators to separate Healthy and FD voices in case of children as well. Healthy samples of children and adult voices were compared giving the clear conclusion that differences exist in the examined acoustical parameters even between healthy child and healthy adult groups. It is necessary to carry out the investigations separately on children's voices as well, we cannot use adult voices to make any conclusions to children's voices. Lastly the differences between adult female and male samples were examined. The study results confirmed our assumptions that in order to build an automatic decision making system that recognizes FD it is advisable to build separate systems for adult males, adult females and children.