Sert Glottal Atakların Sıklığını Değerlendiren Türkçe Okuma Parçası Geliştirme Çalışması

Abstract

ABSTRACT Uygun, M. N. Study of Developing a Reading Passage in Turkish That Assesses the Frequency of Hard Glottal Attacks. Hacettepe University, Institute of Health Sciences, Audiology and Speech Pathology Programme, Master Thesis, Ankara, 2015. The voice should be assessed in different situations such as phonation, conversation and reading. Objective and subjective techniques are used together in the assessment of voice disorders. Reading passages are also important methods that are used in the subjective assessment of voice profiles. Hard glottal attacks that may cause functional voice disorders in the patients are assessed by using reading passages. The main aim of our study is to prepare a passage to be used in the subjective voice assessment in our country and especially in the assessment of the frequency of hard glottal attack and to determine its credibility. In our study, 42 individuals between the ages of 20 and 55 were separated into two groups as study group and control group and the study group was analysed in two subgroups. The study group involved 11 patients with vocal nodule diagnosis and 10 patients with MTD diagnosis and control group involved 21 individuals with no prior voice problem diagnosis. The individuals in the control group were matched with those in study group based on their age, sex and profession. All the individuals who participated in the study were asked to read the prepared Turkish reading passage. The recordings were assessed by the thesis owner and by two expert language and speech therapists with at least 5 years of experience. The internal reliability of the passage (inter-rater – the consistency between the listeners) and the correlation between the two different listenings the first listener made in two different times (intra-rater) were calculated. The inter-listener credibility coefficient was calculated as 0.88 Kappa Statistics and high correlation at the significance level of 0.01 between the first and the second listenings of the first listener was determined by Spearman correlation analysis. In our study, the frequency of hard glottal attack were found to be more significantly higher compared to control group in both disorder groups for both males and females (p<0.05); analysing the number of attacks between the disorder groups, a significant difference between the attack numbers of patients with vocal nodule diagnosis and those with MTD was not observed (p>0.05). The results have presented that the prepared Turkish reading passage is reliable and can be a subjective assessment medium in the assessment of hard glottal attacks in the patients with voice disorders. Key Words: Hard Glottal Attack, Voice Disorder, Reliability, Muscle Tension Dysphonia, Vocal Nodule.