Provo City School District Voice
Quick Screen For Voice
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Name: Birthdate/Age:
Date: Parent Name:
Speech-Language Pathologist:
Speech-Language concerns/services:
Hearing concerns/status:
Pertinent medical and social history:
Directions: The Quick Screen for Voice should be conducted in a quiet area. Elicit verbal activities, such as
spontaneous conversation, picture description, imitated sentences, recited passages, counting, and other
natural samples of voice and speech, or perform the tasks requested. The screening test is
failed if one or more disorders in production are found in any area, indicating that a more thorough
evaluation is needed.
Mark all observations that apply, as the individual produces connected speech:
Respiration
Inhalatory stridor or expiratory wheeze
Infrequent breaths; talking too long on one breath
Limited breath support for speech
Reduced loudness or vocal weakness
Normal respiration for speech
Phonation
Rough or hoarse quality
Vocal strain and effort
Persistent glottal fry
Provo City School District Voice
Conversational pitch is too high or too low
Conversational voice is limited in pitch or loudness variability
Breathy quality
Aphonia
Hard glottal attacks
Conversational voice is too loud or too soft
Normal voice quality
Resonance
Hyponasality (observed during humming, nasal consonant contexts: Mommy makes me muffins;
Man on the moon; Many men make money; etc.)
Consistent mouth breathing
Hypernasality (observed during vowel and oral consonants)
Nasal turbulence or audible nasal emission (observed during pressure consonant contexts:
Counting from 60-69; Popeye plays baseball; Give Kate the cake; Buy Bobby a puppy; Take a
ticket to Daddy; etc.
Juvenile resonance characteristics
Normal Resonance
Nonverbal Vocal Range and Flexibility
Model the series of nonverbal tasks that are described on the test form. Multiple trials are allowed. Visual
cues such as hand gestures, moving a toy car across that table (for maximum phonation time) or up and
down a hill (for pitch range), etc. may be used to supplement the auditory model.
1. Habitual pitch and loudness task: “Count from 1-10. Repeat, but stop at ‘three’ and hold out the /i/.
Abnormal pitch and/or loudness
Normal pitch and loudness
2. Maximum phonation time (MPT) task: “Take your biggest breath and hold out an /a/ as long as possible.”
Provo City School District Voice
Number of seconds /a/ sustained:
MPT less than: Age (years) Normal Mean in Seconds (Range)*
3 7 (3-11)
4 9 (5-15)
5 10 (5-16)
6-7 13 (5-20)
8-9 16 (5-29)
10-12 20 (9-39) Males
15 (5-28) Females
13-17 23 (9-43) Males
20 (9-34) Females
18+ 28 (9-62) Males
22 (6-61) Females
MPT within normal limits
3. Pitch range task: “Make your voice go from low to high like this (demonstrate upward pitch glide on the
word ‘whoop’). Now go down from your highest to lowest (demonstrate rapid downward pitch glide like a
bomb falling).” Or, model and elicit a fire siren sound.
Little pitch variation
Voice breaks in pitch glides up or down
Acceptable pitch range and flexibility
Comments/Observations:
* MPT values are related to age and height; multiple attempts also influence results. Data summarized from Kent,
Kent, & Rosenbek (1997).
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Note. See Quick Screen for Voice, by L. Lee, J. C. Stemple, & L. Galze, in press, Gainesville, FL: Communicare
Publishing. Copyright 2003 by Communicare. Reprinted with permission.