Imke Kissel

Ghent University | UGhent

Objective: Unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP) is often characterized by severe dysphonia and has a significant impact on a patient’s communication in daily and vocational situations. Having a better understanding of how UVFP influences quality of life and patient experiences can help improve patient-centered care in this population. Therefore,...

Purpose: Unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP) is a neurological voice disorder that is often first treated by a speech-language pathologist (SLP). In literature, little consensus is found regarding voice therapy onset, duration, frequency, and content. The aim of the current study is to investigate the clinical practice of SLPs for treatment of U...

Introduction Semi-occluded vocal tract exercises (SOVTEs) are frequently used exercises in voice therapy. An important shortcoming to most SOVTEs is the inability to include continuous speech in these exercises. A variation of water-resistance therapy (WRT), during which a patient phonates through a resonance tube ending in water, was developed to...

Background and aims: Individuals with speech disorders are often judged more negatively than peers without speech disorders. A limited number of studies examined the attitudes of adolescents toward peers with speech disorders due to a cleft lip with or without cleft of the palate (CL ± P). Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate...

Purpose Bilateral vocal fold paralysis (BVFP) is a severe disorder that can result in respiratory, swallowing, and voice-related problems. Most surgical treatments do not restore laryngeal function and often need to compromise voice quality to preserve respiratory function. Laryngeal reinnervation (LR) may offer a solution to this problem, but lite...

Background. A promising way to obtain vocal economy and efficiency is by semi-occluding the vocal tract while phonating. Current knowledge about the immediate effects of semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) phonation on the laryngeal function and configuration is based mainly on computer modeling or excised larynges studies. In in vivo SOVT studies, el...

Background The voice use of choir singers is understudied despite the imbalance of high vocal demands versus low vocal education, and consequently increased risk for voice problems. Also, there is a lack of information on the effects of a performance on choristers’ voices. Available studies included performances of at least one hour. To date, no st...

Objective: People with dysphonia are judged more negatively than peers with normal vocal quality. This preliminary study aims to (1) investigate correlations between both auditory-perceptual and objective measures of vocal quality of dysphonic and non-dysphonic speakers and attitudes of listeners, and (2) discover whether these attitudes towards p...

Purpose This study investigates the long-term voice outcome of thyroidectomy up to 10 years after the surgery using a longitudinal prospective study design. Methods Eighteen participants (6 men and 12 women, mean age: 54 years) who underwent a thyroidectomy between September 2006 and May 2007 were included in this study. A voice assessment protoco...

The term “singer” refers to a population of individuals who perform musical songs or related artistic material using their voices. Research has indicated that, as a population, singers’ voice parameters differ from the non-singer population. Given the fact that diagnosed voice pathologies are more prevalent in the singer population, normative speec...

Introduction To meet the scarcity of training and/or educational initiatives in Uganda regarding state-of-the-art speech diagnosis and treatment in patients with cleft palate, a workshop was organized for all interested speech-language pathologists and health-care workers. Objective To evaluate and compare the inter- and intra-rater reliability of...

Objectives: workshops and specialized training programs are often inaccessible for speech and language pathologists (SLPs) based in resource-limited countries given the lack of supply, the long travel distances and the excessive participation fees. To stimulate life-long learning opportunities for all, this study described and measured the effect o...

Background/aims: There is a lack of studies investigating articulation skills in bilingual children with a migration background. Therefore, the present study compared articulation skills in bilingual Turkish-Dutch/Moroccan Arabic-Dutch children with migration background and monolingual Dutch children without migration background. Moreover, possible...

Background Traditional semi-occluded vocal tract exercises (SOVTEs) are restricted to single-phoneme tasks due to the semi-occlusion at the mouth, which hinders full articulation, continuous speech, and singing. Innovative SOVTEs should overcome this limitation by creating the semi-occlusion outside the oral cavity. Purpose The purpose of this stu...