Stuttering is a speech fluency disorder affecting one percent of the population. It is important to achieve self-actualization in school-age children and adolescents who stutter. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in ascending order, consists of physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up. To satisfy safety needs, we prevent stuttering-related teasing and bullying. To satisfy love and belonging needs, we improve fluency and alleviate fear and avoidance caused by stuttering. To satisfy esteem needs, we ask reasonable accommodations in school and workplace. This article showed a Japanese approach to stuttering based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Since cepstral analysis needs no detection of pitch within waveforms, it can evaluate connected speech contexts and severely disordered voice. The validity of CPP (cepstral peak prominence) and CSID (cepstral spectral index of dysphonia) has been investigated in several studies for various languages via correlation analysis between the acoustic measurements and perceptual evaluation as well as receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. Those studies have indicated that CPP and CSID are useful as indicators of dysphonia as well as indices of dysphonia severity. In addition, reliability assessment of CPP and CSID for severe disordered voice was performed by repeating the analysis for the same voice samples. The results showed that CPP and CSID were reliable even for severe disordered voices. Since cepstral acoustic measures were regarded as valid and reliable, it is desirable to utilize cepstral acoustic measures in clinical practice.

The objective of this study was to examine the content of narratives of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (5 to 7 years old, n=7 children) showing no delay in intellectual development and compare it with the utterances of the control group (10 children with typical development). The task asked the children to describe what kind of story was being told on four sheets of illustrations depicting 12 episodes. The obtained narratives were compared in terms of utterance volume, utterance content (action, state, mental state), causal connection, and story organization. The results showed that the amount of speech did not differ between the two groups. In narrative content structure, the two groups were similar in producing many utterances related to actions and few related to emotions. However, regarding the causal explanation of events, the narratives of children with ASD revealed difficulty in organizing the psychological story and the narrative so as to causally link the content related to emotions with other events. From this study, we concluded that ASD children who receive language treatment in early childhood characteristically demonstrate narrative issues in the latter half of early childhood compared to TD children of the same age. This suggests the importance, through early intervention from early childhood, of narrative development support focusing on causal relationships and narrative composition related to the emotions of the characters.

Previous studies have demonstrated that measures of second-formant (F2) movements (duration of F2 change, extent of F2 change, and F2 slope) serve as acoustic indices of articulatory deficits in dysarthric speakers. The present study is intended to determine if there is any difference between dysarthric speakers and normal speakers, to examine relationships with speech intelligibility, and to determine the magnitude of variability among target words in the acoustic measures of F2 movements. Thirteen adult speakers with mild and moderate dysarthria and normal adult speakers participated in this study. Each speaker was asked to read a passage from (the Japanese version of) "The North Wind and the Sun" aloud at his or her normal rate. The extent and duration of F2 movements were measured on the two-vowel sequence /ai/ in two target words (taiyou and gaitou). F2 duration was significantly longer, and F2 slope was significantly lower in the dysarthric subjects than in the normals. F2 slope showed a significant correlation with speech intelligibility (rs=-0.59). The coefficient of variations in the second formant movement was greater for the dysarthric speakers. These findings suggest that the indices of F2 movement would be useful for evaluating articulatory ability in Japanese-speaking dysarthric speakers.

This study aimed to analyze the differences in clinical characteristics between pediatric vocal cord nodules (PVCNs) and adult vocal fold nodules (AVCNs). We compared the laryngeal findings between PVCNs and AVCNs at the initial videolaryngoscopy examination. Eighteen patients were included in this study: seven children and eleven adults.
PVCNs demonstrated significant differences from AVCNs in the following respects: 1) vocal trauma caused by frequent screaming; 2) long hoarseness duration; 3) large size of vocal cord nodule; 4) a high proportion of G2 hoarseness in auditory-perceptual vocal analysis (GRBAS scale); and 5) a high-amplitude perturbation quotient value in acoustic analysis.
Although vocal abuses affected both PVCNs and AVCNs, the frequent screaming and long-term hoarseness associated with PVCNs were considered risk factors that made nodule size, auditory-perceptual vocal analysis and acoustic parameters more severe than those of AVCNs.
It is said that most PVCNs are improved or healed after puberty. Some PVCNs marked by severe hoarseness with repeated voice abuses, including screaming for a long time, may lead to fibrous vocal cord nodule necessitating surgical treatment in the future.

Objective: The study aimed to confirm the intertext robustness of the Acoustic Voice Quality Index for the Japanese-speaking population using reading tasks derived differently from those initially reported.
Methods: Two reading texts were extracted from a passage with 58 syllables taken from the Japanese translation of 'The North Wind and the Sun': one was the same as in the original study, namely 30 syllables from the first part of the passage, and the other was the remaining 28 syllables. The AVQI values were calculated from reading samples of these texts (AVQI₃₀ and AVQI₂₈). The concurrent validity and diagnostic accuracy of AVQI₃₀ and AVQI₂₈ for estimating hoarseness levels were evaluated on 311 combined samples of continuous speech and sustained vowels.
Results: Both AVQI₃₀ and AVQI₂₈ showed sufficient concurrent validity (r=0.850 and r=0.842, respectively). Subsequently, receiver operating characteristic analysis showed the area under the curve tobe 0.897 and 0.892, indicating the excellent discriminative capability of AVQI₃₀ and AVQI₂₈. In AVQI₃₀, the original threshold of 2.06 corresponded to sensitivity and specificity of 80% and 85%, respectively, whereas in AVQI₂₈, 83% and 75%, respectively. The absolute differences between them were judged to be negligible.
Conclusion: The results demonstrated the probability of the intertext robustness of AVQI.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of consonants and vowels on the occurrence of stuttering and the relationships between initial mora frequency and the amount of stuttering among Japanese school-age children who stutter (CWS). The final aim was to determine why Japanese CWS find it difficult to pronounce words beginning with vowels. The participants were 20 Japanese CWS aged 6 to 12 years. Free conversations between the participants and the author were recorded, and their speech was analyzed. Binomial logistic regression revealed that consonant-vowel difference had no significant impact on the occurrence of stuttering. In addition, certain vowels (/i/, /o/, and /a/) had a higher initial mora frequency than consonants. Furthermore, the amount of stuttering of those vowels is also greater than that of consonants. Taken together, we speculate that Japanese CWS find it difficult to pronounce words that begin with certain vowels because these vowels are more likely to appear at the beginning of a "bunsetsu" (a kind of Japanese linguistic unit), and the number of occurrences of stuttering was also higher with these vowels.

We examined the dropout rate of voice therapy, influencing factors, and characteristics of early dropout cases. The subjects were 195 patients with voice disorders; the average age was 43.6±19.5 years. The presence or absence of voice therapy dropout as the dependent variable and background factors (age, occupation, illness period, number of days from prescription to treatment start, smoking and drinking) and pre-treatment voice evaluation (MPT, G, VHI-10) as independent variables were used to investigate the influencing factors of dropout. In addition, the Z value was calculated using the average value and standard deviation of MPT and VHI-10, and the degree of problem consciousness to voice was categorized into excess group, reasonable group, and decreased group, and the ratio was examined. Furthermore, we examined the factors of early dropout cases with the number of voice therapy sessions as a dependent variable.
The overall dropout rate was 22.6%. In other speech disorders and psychological and mental disorders, occupation and VHI-10 were significantly associated with dropout influencing factors. Age and MPT were significantly related to the number of voice therapy sessions.

We report the case of a patient who experienced vocal hoarseness for a long period following attainment of a lower vocal pitch after adolescent voice change. The larynx showed no organic laryngeal abnormalities, but slit-shaped glottal closure insufficiency and supraglottic hypercontraction during phonation were observed. At the beginning of voice therapy, we employed semi-occluded vocal tract exercises, and the hoarseness improved in sustained vowel phonation. However, the hoarseness flared up again when he pronounced consonants and spoke with intonation. We then employed the Weleminsky digital manipulation method and had the patient increase his vocal loudness, a combination often used to treat mutational dysphonia, and his hoarseness improved.
In this case, muscle tension dysphonia was caused by dysregulation of the laryngeal muscles due to adolescent voice change. The slit-like glottis closure insufficiency may have occurred because of a predominance of activity of the cricothyroid muscle in comparison with the adductor muscles and excessive contraction of the supraglottic region, causing hoarseness. Therefore, we undertook a voice therapy technique that relieves hypertension of the cricothyroid muscle, moderately promotes the muscle tension of the adductor muscles, and corrects the imbalance in muscle tension between the adductor muscles and the cricothyroid muscle.

A right-handed 73-year-old man developed sensory aphasia due to a left temporoparietal infarction after a previous lacunar infarction of the right putamen. His aphasia improved rapidly, but as he also had abrupt-type high-frequency central hearing loss, pure word deafness was suspected. We assessed phoneme recognition in his left and right ears due to the difference in lesions in the left and right hemispheres. In the early onset stage, his performance on speech audiometry of the right ear declined, but the performance of the left ear declined gradually. We examined confusion matrices of phoneme perception errors from speech audiometry in the left and right ears. In both ears, but especially in the right ear, many confusions in phoneme perception were present where Japanese consonants and vowels were misheard as /r/. As a characteristic of pure word deafness, it is possible that the phonological characteristics of consonants and vowels could not be grasped, and an ambiguous /r/ was guessed and heard differently. In the left ear, there was an increase in hearing errors with similar articulation styles and points, and nasalization of low-frequency sounds. There was some damage to the neural connections near the acoustic radiation around the right putamen. Furthermore, as changes in auditory central nerves due to aging were also involved, we postulated that those led to the symptoms of abrupt-type high-frequency hearing loss due to central nervous system disorders.