Acoustic "breathiness measures" in the description of pathologic voices

One important perceptual attribute of voice quality is breathiness. Since breathiness is generally regarded to be caused by glottal air leakage, acoustic measures related to breathiness may be used to distinguish between different physiological phonation conditions for pathological voices. Seven "breathiness features" described in the literature plus one self-developed measure (the glottal to noise excitation ratio, GNE) are compared for their distinguishing properties between different well-defined pathological phonation mechanisms. It is found that only GNE allows a distinction between all the pathological groups and both the normal and aphonic reference group. Furthermore, GNE is among the measures showing the most significant distinctions between the different pathologic phonation mechanism groups. Therefore GNE should be given preference over the other features in the independent assessment of glottal air leakage or "breathiness" for moderately or highly disturbed voices.