Perceptual evaluation of hypernasality compared to HONC measures: The role of experience

Objectives: Nasality ratings from experienced and inexperienced listeners were compared to accelerometric measures using the Horii Oral Nasal Coupling (HONC) Index to determine if one group's ratings are more closely related to the HONC Index measures. The reliability of listener ratings was studied to determine if experienced listeners had better reliability than inexperienced listeners. The influence of phonetic content was analysed to learn if ratings of sentences with stop consonants yielded higher correlations with HONC scores than sentences containing glides. Design: Experienced and inexperienced listeners' ratings of hypernasality were correlated to the HONC measures for two nonnasal sentence productions. Analysis of variance compared experienced versus inexperienced listener ratings. Participants: Ten listeners who were speech-language pathologists with at least 10 years of experience in assessing hypernasality and 10 listeners who were graduate students in communicative disorders with less than 1 year of experience. Speech samples were acquired from 13 children with varying degrees of hypernasality and 5 children with normal nasality. Results: Correlations between ratings of hypernasality and HONC scores were .60 for the experienced group and .52 for the inexperienced group. In general, the experienced listeners rated the hypernasality of the speakers as less severe. Both groups had similar intrajudge reliability. Hypernasality ratings were not influenced by sentence context. Conclusions: Hypernasality can be rated in a reliable fashion regardless of listener experience. The correlations between the objective measure of nasalnation (HONC) and the perceptual ratings were not as high as expected. Factors contributing to obtaining only moderate correlations will be discussed.