Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to T Wika.
Own experience in microsurgery of vocal folds are presented. The necessity and importance of photographic and acoustic documentation (MDVP) as well as phoniatric pre- and postoperative rehabilitation are stressed.
In 30 individuals aged 50 to 82 the following audiologic examinations were performed: tonal audiometry (air/bone conduction), impedance audiometry (tympanometry and registration of stapedius reflex to pure tone of 0.5-4 kHz and noises) and ERA tests after acoustic stimulation from different levels of the hearing pathway (BERA, MLR and SP). The assessment of the results showed:--1. the threshold values in the objective methods are proportional to those obtained in tonal audiometry;--2. in ERA an interpersonal lability of latencies at different levels of the hearing pathway was observed including shortening, elongation and normal values;--3. in 70% of the examined aged 50-82 SRT were below 70 dB SL and loudness sumation below 25 dB;--4. shortening of the SP latencies was in 100% correlated to the low values of the loudness summation and recruitment found in psychophysical examinations.
Even a careful fitting of hearing aid cannot always guarantee full recompensation for lost hearing. Although speech is significantly strengthened by the hearing aid, the received signals sound slightly differently. To take full advantage of hearing aid capacity and to understand speech better, it is necessary to carry out exercises within the hearing training. The aim of the exercises is to acquire perceptive differences appearing between particular speech sounds. Each exercise deals with particular phonetic distinctive feature differentiating the speech sounds of the Polish language. Language substance comprises the so-called minimal pairs: pairs of words which differ only by one speech sound e.g. park, kark. Preservation of identical phonetic structure within remaining parts of words allows for the exposure of sound differences referring to selected speech sounds. First exercises with children who lost hearing in the prelingual period should be carried out for a period between a few weeks to a few month with the cooperation and under a supervision of a specialist (logopedics or surdopedagogics).
Ten articulation lists for speech intelligibility testing and evaluation of hearing impairment type have been constructed. Each list contains 24 from among the most frequent monosyllabic Polish nouns. The lists are balanced phonemically, semantically, acoustically and structurally.
Ten articulation lists for speech intelligibility testing and evaluation of hearing impairment type have been constructed. Each list contains 24 from among the most frequent monosyllabic Polish nouns. The lists are balanced phonemically, semantically, acoustically and structurally.
The material of this investigation comprised a group of 18 patients with deep hypoacousis (over 70 dB) or complete deafness which, depending on the onset of the deafness, was divided into the 3 categories: congenital, early childhood to 3rd year of life, and postlingual. All of them underwent ENT, phoniatric and stroboscopy examinations; in 10, X-ray tomography of the larynx was also performed. The status of hearing ability was assessed by audiometric examinations using pure tones in air and bone conductions. The acoustic examinations comprising spectrographic and tonographic analyses were performed on an appropriate linguistic material including vowels, isolated words, sentences and reading text. The measurement of Fo was performed on isolated vowels. In order to characterise the degree and kind of periodicity disturbances the following parameters were estimated: the medium value of fundamental frequency, the range of Fo variability, the maximal change of period length from cycle to cycle, and its medium value (jitter). The results of the acoustic examinations revealed different degrees and kinds of periodicity disturbances depending on the depth of the hypoacousis and its onset.
Phoniatric and acoustic examinations were carried out in a group of 30 patients with dysphonia, including 15 with organic type and 15 with functional type. A complex phoniatric assessment offered the possibility to differentiate between these two groups of pathological voices. This was achieved also on the basis of acoustic analysis of the voice by extracting characteristics such as: formant frequency, Fo and its range, percentage of noise in the analysed verbal text, mean and maximum values of jitter. The possibility of differential diagnosis of these two different types of dysphonia in acoustic studies was confirmed by clinical examinations. The acoustic studies presented can be regarded as a new approach to a fast and sufficiently precise method in the screening diagnostics of dysphonia conditioned by growth of the vocal fold mass.