Contrary to the previous belief that any presence of supraglottic activity indicates presence of hyperfunctional vocal pathology, Stager et al. (2000, 2002) found out that supraglottic compressions do occur in normal subjects. In fact, dynamic false vocal fold compressions during production of phrases with a great number of glottal stops were noted. The present study hypothesized that a similar pattern s would be observed at sentence level, where at least 50% or higher incidence of dynamic FVF compressions would be observed at aurally perceived glottal stops and other linguistic markers, such as vowel-initial words, /t/ final words, punctuations and phrase boundaries, where glottal stops were likely to occur.
Nasendoscopic recordings were obtained from 8 healthy subjects (2M; 6F) during production of selected sentence stimuli.. Their audio recordings were rated by two judges to detect the location of glottal stops. Then, the video images were analyzed to categorize the presence and absence of dynamic and static false vocal folds (FVF) or anterior posterior (AP) compressions. Results indicated that the incidence of dynamic FVF compressions was 30%. Nevertheless, the average incidence was elevated at aurally perceived glottal stops and at the linguistic contexts that are known to be associated with glottal stops compared to other contexts.