RESUMEN
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The effect of vocal abuse on school teachers' lives has not been sufficiently studied in Korea. Our goal was to investigate teachers' vocal characteristics and their functional, physical and emotional disorders due to vocal abuse, and the correlation between them. SUBJECTS AND METHOD: Voice samples of 142 school teachers who responded to the Voice Handicap Index (VHI) questionnaire were used for the acoustic analysis. The results were compared with the control group of 27 office workers of our hospital, who matched the experimental group with respect to age and sex. RESULTS: The subjective measure of VHI showed that the teacher handicap indices were significantly higher than those of the control group in functional, physical and emotional aspects: the corresponding median values were 8, 10, 4.5 and 2, 3, 1 for the two groups, respectively (p<0.05). There was no difference in jitter, shimmer and signal-to-noise ratio between the groups. A cross-correlation analysis revealed no significant correlation between VHI-scores and the results of acoustic analysis. CONCLUSION: The teachers recognize their voice problems as a serious physico-functional disorder. However, the acoustic analysis of the 2 second-voice samples could not detect any differences in voice quality between the two groups. There was no significant correlation between VHI scores and acoustic measures. It suggests that the acoustic measures of voice samples with a limited duration might have a restrictive value in presenting handicaps associated with voice abuse.