Building on her clinical speech therapy practice, Angélique Remacle has focused her doctoral thesis on the study of vocal loading in kindergarten and elementary school teachers, a segment of the population that is particularly vulnerable to voice disorders. By quantifying vocal loading under real-world conditions, the study was able to establish reference standards and raise awareness of the need for preventative measures to help these professionals protect their most valuable tool, their voice. 

It was during her work as a speech therapist at the Liège University Hospital that Angélique Remacle, a researcher in ULg's Voice Therapy Unit, noticed that some of her patient's vocal problems persisted even after using traditional speech therapy tools to improve their voice quality: "In order to optimize the patient's voice, therapeutic techniques focus primarily on the three main aspects of the voice: respiration, phonation, and resonance. In some cases, the patient can use the appropriate vocal technique without necessarily seeing the expected vocal improvements. In this case, the problem is obviously situated elsewhere... In the person's vocal load, or how much they use their voice."

In fact, each person has their own particular level of vocal endurance. If this endurance is put to the test on a daily basis, it can lead to voice disorders or pathologies that are benign but still adversely affect their ability to work. Angélique Remacle therefore decided to investigate the hypothesis that vocal loading contributes to voice disorders among professional voice users, people who need to use their voice in their work such as singers, actors, secretaries, politicians, journalists, call center operators, etc. However, she chose to focus her study on kindergarten and elementary school teachers given their overrepresentation in voice clinics. 

Why female subjects?

`The sample of thirty-two normophonic female subjects, that is teachers without any voice problems, was studied during an entire workweek. The study was explicitly focused on women, for kindergarten and elementary school teaching is a very female profession. Furthermore, women are potentially more vulnerable than men because of differences in constitution and hormones. Their vocal cords are formed differently than men’s, which renders them more fragile vocally. They also have a higher vocal frequency than men, which entails more vibrations and vocal cord collisions for the same amount of phonation.