There are a lot of papers on automatic classification between normal and pathological voices, but they have the lack in the degree of severity estimation of the identified voice disorders. Building a model of pathological and normal voices identification, that can also evaluate the degree of severity of the identified voice disorders among students. In the present work, we present an automatic classifier using acoustical measurements on registered sustained vowels /a/ and pattern recognition tools based on neural networks. The training set was done by classifying students' recorded voices based on threshold from the literature. We retrieve the pitch, jitter, shimmer and harmonic-to-noise ratio values of the speech utterance /a/, which constitute the input vector of the neural network. The degree of severity is estimated to evaluate how the parameters are far from the standard values based on the percent of normal and pathological values. In this work, the base data used for testing the proposed algorithm of the neural network is formed by healthy and pathological voices from German database of voice disorders. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in a term of the accuracy (97.9%), sensitivity (1.6%), and specificity (95.1%). The classification rate is 90% for normal class and 95% for pathological class.

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The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of hearing, voice disorder, stuttering and dyslexia on the academic performance, the feeling of social rejection, self-confidence of hard science major students in universities in Morocco. 229 students belonging to the University Hassan II Mohammedia –Casablanca representing a biology college and an engineering school participated in the survey. The average age of students is 22 years and suffers no physical or mental disability. Our results indicate that these disorders are related to low self-confidence, developed the feeling of social rejection and this considered major difficulties for success in studies. The majority of students say that they encountered difficulties to continue their studies, which suggests that the disorder leads to a form of academic failure. Keywords:   Communication disorder, learning difficulties, academic performance, self- confidence