Diagnostic accuracy of the Smoothed Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPPS) in the detection of dysphonia in the Spanish language

The smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS) is an acoustic measure that can be calculated in both sustained vowels and continuous speech. The goal of this work is to find out the diagnostic accuracy of CPPS in the detection of dysphonia in Spanish. In this study 136 subjects with dysphonia and 47 healthy subjects participated. For each subject a sustained vowel and the reading of three phonetically balanced sentences were recorded. The CPPS was calculated with Praat using its default configuration (configuration 1), and also with the one used in the calculation of the Acoustic Voice Quality Index (configuration 2). Five experts perceptively assessed the voice of the subjects in the sample by means of the GRABS scale. The CPPS has a great power of discrimination between the normal and the pathological voice, whether it is calculated from the sustained vowel /a/ (AROC[config. 1] = 0.863 and AROC[config. 2] = 0.841) or whether it is calculated from the sentences (AROC[config. 1] = 0.884 and AROC[config. 2] = 0.866). The results confirm that CPPS is a valid acoustic measurement to detect dysphonia in the Spanish language.