Impact of Dysphonic Schoolteachers’ Voices on Children’s Reaction Times according to Phonemic Contrasts

Abstract

<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> This paper aimed at observing the impact of dysphonic voice on children’s reception of a linguistic message by evaluating their reaction times (RTs) to instructions given by functional dysphonic and control female schoolteachers (STs). <b><i>Methods:</i></b> French minimal pairs such as /muʃ/ (“mouche” <i>fly</i>) versus /buʃ/ (“bouche” <i>mouth</i>) embedded in a carrier sentence “click on the drawing of…” were produced by two groups of 10 dysphonic and control female ST, matched in age and year of experience. The phonemical contrasts observed are voicing, nasality, consonantal place of articulation, vowel roundedness, and vowel place of articulation. The experimentation was presented in the form of a computer game to children from 7 to 10 years old. Two images illustrating the target words were presented, accompanied by the oral instructions recorded by ST. With a two-button box created for the experiment, children had to click as quickly as possible on the image corresponding to the instruction. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Our results show that the RTs of all children are affected by the ST’s dysphonia, regardless of their age and that they have significantly longer RT when discriminating minimal pairs contrasting in voicing when the instruction is given by a dysphonic speaker compared to the same instruction given by a control speaker. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> These observations could be explained by the fact that functional dysphonia is associated with improper use of the vocal folds and thus an alteration of voicing.