PURPOSE: to evaluate the concordance of the auditory-perceptive evaluation between intra and inter-raters, done as an isolated form and simultaneously accomplished to the correspondent spectrographic tracing in order to check whether the presentation of the vocal stimulus and spectrographic together increases the perceptual voice evaluation reliability. METHODS: this is a longitudinal study, where six speech and language therapists evaluated in two distinct moments 105 dysphonic and non-dysphonic voices of a perceptual voice evaluation form: firstly without, and afterwards with correspondent spectrograms presentations. Twenty percent of the voices were repeated randomly in both instances, in order to check for the intrarater agreement. GRBASI scale was used for the vocal evaluation. For inter-rater reliability analysis was used the statistical index Kappa Fleiss, and for intrarater reliability was used the Spearman's coefficient correlation. RESULTS: in the perceptual voice evaluation there was not statistically significant difference among inter-rater reliability with and without the spectrographic. However, there was an increase of the concordance among appraisers for G, R, B and S. There was no statistically significant difference among intrarater reliability with and without the visual support of spectrogram, however, there was an increase in the intrarater concordance for the variables G, B and I, after presenting the visual stimulation. CONCLUSION: spectrogram's visual support does not significantly increase the perceptual voice evaluation reliability, but helps it, once that it promotes better inter and intra-appraisers' concordance.
Voice; Voice Disorders; Speech Language and Hearing Sciences; Speech Acoustics
