Reliability and Validity of the Turkish Version of the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V).

OBJECTIVES: The main purpose of this study was to culturally adapt the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V) to Turkish and to evaluate its internal consistency, validity, and reliability.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Turkish version of CAPE-V was developed, and with the use of a prospective case-control design, the voice recordings of 130 participants were collected according to CAPE-V protocol. Auditory-perceptual evaluation was conducted according to CAPE-V and Grade, Roughness, Breathiness, Asthenia, and Strain (GRBAS) scale by two ear, nose, and throat specialists and two speech and language therapists. The different types of voice disorders, classified as organic and functional disorders, were compared in terms of their CAPE-V scores.

RESULTS: The overall severity parameter had the highest intrarater and inter-reliability values for all the participants. For all four raters, the differences in the six CAPE-V parameters between the study and the control groups were found to be statistically significant. Among the correlations for the comparable parameters of the CAPE-V and the GRBAS scales, the highest correlation was found between the overall severity-grade parameters. There was no difference found between the organic and functional voice disorders in terms of the CAPE-V scores.

CONCLUSIONS: The Turkish version of CAPE-V has been proven to be a reliable and valid instrument to use in the auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice. For the future application of this study, it would be important to investigate whether cepstral measures correlate with the auditory-perceptual judgments of dysphonia severity collected by a Turkish version of the CAPE-V.