Vocal Behavior in Preschool Children

Abstract

Dysphonia among preschool children has attracted the attention of a considerable number of researchers and clinicians, presumably because this phenomenon is assumed to affect the vocal health and developmental potential of the children. Dysphonia is defined as perceptual audible change of a patient’s habitual voice as self judged by his or her listeners. . Dysphonic voice can also be defined as that voice that fails to meet a patient’s vocal demands, personality, age, or gender. The incidence of childhood dysphonia in schools varies from 6% to 23.4%, witha peak between five and ten years of age, while the incidence of hyperfunctional childhood dysphonia is 38% to 78% of dysphonic children. The overall prevalence of dysphonia in a statistically representative sample was 14%, the ratio between males and females has varied between3:1; however most researchers remark a higher occurrence of such vocal alteration in male children, which is justified by the social demand of a more aggressive behavior. The predisposing and aggravating factors of dysphonia in preschool children may be due to inadequate vocal habits, physical and psychological factors, personality structure, phonic inadequacy and allergic factors.