Revisiting the Rainbow: Culturally Responsive Updates to a Standard Clinical Resource

Clinical Focus: The Development and Description of a Palette of Transmasculine Voices

PURPOSE

The study of gender and speech has historically excluded studies of transmasculine individuals. Consequently, generalizations about speech and gender are based on cisgender individuals. This lack of representation hinders clinical training and clinical service delivery, particularly by speech-language pathologists providing gender-affirming communication services. This letter describes a new corpus of the speech of American English-speaking transmasculine men, transmasculine nonbinary people, and cisgender men that is open and available to clinicians and researchers.

METHOD

Twenty masculine-presenting native English speakers from the Upper Midwestern United States (including cisgender men, transmasculine men, and transmasculine nonbinary people) were recorded, producing three sets of speech materials: Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice sentences, the Rainbow Passage, and a novel set of sentences developed for this project. Acoustic measures vowels (overall formant frequency scaling, vowel-space dispersion, fundamental frequency, breathiness), consonants (voice onset time of word-initial voiceless stops, spectral moments of word-initial /s/), and the entire sentence (rate of speech) that were made.

RESULTS

The acoustic measures reveal a wide range for all dependent measures and low correlations among the measures. Results show that many of the voices depart considerably from the norms for men's speech in published studies.

CONCLUSION

This new corpus can be used to illustrate different ways of sounding masculine by speech-language pathologists performing gender-affirming communication services and by higher education teachers as examples of diverse ways of sounding masculine.

Clinical Utility and Validation of the Acoustic Voice Quality and Acoustic Breathiness Indexes for Voice Disorder Assessment in English Speakers

BACKGROUND

While several acoustic voice metrics are available for clinical voice assessment, there remains a significant need for reliable and ecologically valid tools. The Acoustic Voice Quality Index version 03.01 (AVQI-3) and Acoustic Breathiness Index (ABI) hold potential due to their comprehensive assessment approach, incorporating diverse voice aspects. However, these tools still need to be validated in English-speaking populations.

METHODS

This study assessed the discriminatory accuracy and validity of AVQI-3 and ABI in 197 participants, including 148 with voice disorders. Voice samples were collected, followed by AVQI-3 and ABI calculations. Additionally, auditory-perceptual assessments were conducted by a panel of speech-language pathologists.

RESULTS

AVQI-3 and ABI effectively identified disordered voice quality, evidenced by high accuracy (AUCs: 0.84, 0.89), sensitivity, and specificity (thresholds: AVQI-3 = 1.17, ABI = 2.35). Strong positive correlations were observed with subjective voice quality assessments (rs = 0.72, rs = 0.77, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

The study highlights AVQI-3 and ABI as promising instruments for clinically assessing voice disorders in U.S. English speakers, underscoring their utility in clinical practice and voice research.