This study demonstrated that "vocal effort" is a legitimate laryngeal perception that can be detected by many subjects who have voice disorders and by some normal control subjects. Further, subjects with voice disorders found that the degree of vocal effort in speech was greatest for voiceless obstruent consonants, followed by voiced obstruents; sonorants and nasals required the least effort. A panel of listeners, however, could not detect differences in roughness, breathiness, intonation, or overall vocal quality as the perceived vocal effort varied.