Intelligibility is an important concern for people with motor speech disorders, like that associated with Parkinson's disease. Objectively assessing intelligibility can be very time-consuming. We know that assessments can be done more efficiently with fewer listeners and faster methods. Can we also improve efficiency by shortening the speech samples used in the process? Yes, as long as we take into account the method, number of listeners, and listener experience, as all of these factors interact to affect both efficiency and accuracy of the measure. Clinicians and researchers can prioritize either shorter speech samples or fewer listeners to improve efficiency while maintaining the accuracy of their intelligibility estimates, when these interacting factors are taken into account.

Voice is an important means of expressing gender for many transmasculine people. Gender-affirming hormone treatment with testosterone (T) can lead to voice changes, but not for everyone. And not all transmasculine people take T. So we need non-hormonal options for voice care for those who want a more masculine-sounding voice. Could laryngeal manipulation approaches be such an option? For some folks, yes! After a single session, most transmasculine speakers saw changes in their pitch, the position of their larynx, and how masculine their voice sounded to others. 

Here's a short read from Inside Sargent—an interview with BU speech-language pathology alum Felicia François, who completed part of this project for a master's thesis.

Telepractice platforms substantially change the acoustics of a patient's voice. So can voice clinicians trust what they hear when listening to a patient by telepractice? They can! Speech pathologists and laryngologists (ENTs) evaluated speakers with a variety of voice disorders as reliably and accurately by telepractice as in person. Expert clinicians seem to distinguish between the "noise" of platforms like Zoom and the "noise" of a voice disorder.

Here's a quick write-up on this project from Inside Sargent magazine.

Many features of voice and speech contribute to the perception of gender and femininity. Are certain features particularly important in determining how the voices of transgender women are perceived? Seems so! Trans women with higher pitched and louder voices were perceived as more feminine by both unfamiliar listeners and by trans women themselves. Trans women rated their voices as less feminine than did listeners, revealing the importance of self-perceptions in this population.