Normative Nasalance Scores for Brazilian Portuguese Using New Speech Stimuli

Abstract

Objective: Normative data were established for newly developed speech materials for nasalance assessment in Brazilian Portuguese. Materials and Methods: Nasalance scores of preexisting passages (oral ZOO-BR, low-pressure oral ZOO-BR2 and NASAL-BR), new nasalance passages (oral Dudu no zoológico, oral Dudu no bosque, oral-nasal O cãozinho Totó and nasal O nenê) and Brasilcleft articulation screening sentences were collected from 245 speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, including 121 males and 124 females, divided into 4 groups: children (5-9 years), adolescents (10-19 years), young adults (20-24 years) and adults (25-35 years). Results: Across all nasalance passages, adult females scored on average 2 percentage points higher than males. Children scored 2-4 percentage points lower than older groups for the preexisting nasalance passages ZOO-BR and ZOO-BR2. Nasalance scores for the new nasalance passages were not significantly different from the preexisting passages. Scores for high-pressure sentences did not differ significantly from the oral nasalance passage Dudu no bosque. Conclusion: The nasalance scores for the new nasalance passages were equivalent to the preexisting materials. The new shortened and simplified nasalance passages will be useful for assessing young children. Normative scores for the Brasilcleft high-pressure sentences were equivalent to the new oral passage Dudu no bosque.

Influence of Voice Focus on Oral-Nasal Balance in Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

“…In the normal condition, the mean nasalance scores for the oral stimuli ranged from 14.33% (SD 4.63) to 18.10% (SD 6.60). This was slightly higher than the normative score of 14.04% (SD 3.82) reported for a comparable oral passage [23]. The mean scores for the balanced oral-nasal stimuli ranged from 32.77% (SD 5.21) to 41.83% (SD 5.67) which was greater than the reported normative mean of 26.90% (SD 4.00) for a balanced oral-nasal stimulus [23].…”

“…Marino et al [23] provided normative nasalance scores by age and gender. The data from the current study could therefore be compared to the normative data for young adult females.…”

“…Participant sample size was determined based on previous research [21,23]. Assuming a mean nasalance score of 49% (SD 5) for the nasal loaded passage O nenê in the normal speaking condition and a score of 54% (SD 5) for the forward focus, we determined a minimum sample size of 8 to achieve a power of 0.8 and an alpha of p = 0.05 (one-sided).…”

“…Seven of these sentences were taken from stimuli designed by the second author (V.C.C.M.) [23] and the remaining 2 sentences were from Trindade et al [24]. The shortened stimuli were used to make the task more manageable for the participants.…”

Nasalância de populações falantes do português brasileiro de dois estados distintos

“…The means of nasalance scores in individuals from the states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais were 49.6% and 49.9% for the nasal-2 text and 14.3% and 9.8% for the oral text, respectively; therefore, within the normality range for the Brazilian population with this type of speech stimulus (7,23) .…”