PURPOSE: To characterize the occurrence of plosive sounds' devoicing in the speech of dysphonic children. METHODS: Fifty children with ages between four and eight years old (40 dysphonic and ten without any vocal disorders) were recorded repeating six sentences containing plosive phonemes in initial, medial and final tonic positions. Both spectrographic and auditory-perceptual analyses were carried out. RESULTS: Devoicing of plosive phonemes occurred unsystematically. It was more identified in the spectrographic analysis, and varied according to the phoneme and its position in the word. CONCLUSION: The speech of both dysphonic children and children without vocal disorders presented unsystematic substitution of voiced by voiceless plosive phonemes. The substitutions were less frequent when the phoneme occurred in medial tonic position.
Speech; Voice disorders; Speech disorders; Speech acoustics; Child
