ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

4aSC17. Acoustic and perceptual effects of endoscopic nasal surgery.

Marilyn Y. Chen

Res. Lab. of Electron. and Dept. of Health Sci. and Technol., MIT, Rm. 36-511, Cambridge, MA 02139

Ralph Metson

Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston, MA 02114

The aim of this paper is to determine the effects of surgical alterations of nasal anatomy on the spectral characteristics and perceptual attributes of speech. Five patients who underwent endoscopic nasal surgery were recorded prior to surgery, and 1 week and 1 month after surgery. The utterances were six vowel types adjacent to nasal consonants and stop consonants. In addition to endonasal surgery enlarging the sinus openings, some patients had a correction of deviated septum, resection of a turbinate, or removal of polyps. Acoustic analysis was carried out for nasalized vowels, non-nasalized vowels, and the nasal consonants /m/ and /n/. Significant differences in spectral properties were observed in the consonants and nasalized vowels recorded before and after surgery. For example, changes were found in the prominence of extra peaks due to nasalization and the first formant bandwidth was narrower for the nasal consonants and nasalized vowels. All except one patient perceived a change in their speech post-operatively. Attempts were made to account for the speech changes by incorporating the anatomical alterations caused by surgery into a speech production model. [Work supported by NSF NIH, and LeBel fellowship.]