A STUDY OF TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF GLOTTAL FLOW DERIVATIVE ESTIMATES ASSOCIATED WITH LARYNGEAL PATHOLOGY
This paper presents a comparative study of the temporal structure of the glottal flow derivative signal associated with laryngeal pathology in relation to an idealized view of voice source realizations as defined by LiljencrantsFant’s model. Specifically, we endeavor to ascertain the extent by which Liljencrants-Fant’s model can be used to represent the glottal flow derivative estimates obtained via closed-phase pitch synchronous inverse filtering of recorded speech. The results obtained on six common voice pathology examples show that due to the limited degrees of freedom, Liljencrants-Fant’s model is only capable of adequately representing the “coarse” glottal pulse structure. Our findings demonstrate that the “fine” structural elements constitute an important aspect of a glottal flow derivative realization and we have presented evidence that they contain information related to voice individuality. A further inadequacy of Liljencrants-Fant’s model is that its parameters do not always accurately portray significant events in the vocal fold dynamics.