Speech intelligibility of laryngectomized patients who use different types of vocal communication

Abstract

Modern methods of speech rehabilitation after a total laryngectomy have come to a great success by giving the patients a possibility to establish an intelligible and functional speech after an adequate rehabilitation treatment. The aim of this paper was to examine speech intelligibility of laryngectomized patients who use different types of vocal communication: esophageal speech, speech with tracheoesophageal prosthesis and speech with electronic laringeal prosthesis. The research was conducted on a sample of 125 laryngectomized patients of both sexes, between 48 and 85 years of age. For the subjective assessment of speech intelligibility, we used the phonetically balanced text. In the paper we used the descriptive statistics methods (the arithmetic mean with standard deviation, as well as minimum and maximum). The differences between the groups were determined by the t-test for independent samples. Pirson's correlation coefficient was used to examine the correlation between the two variables. The examinees are statistically different by the results achieved on the speech intelligibility test. The esophageal patients have the highest scores (1.13±0.86), while the patients with the vocal prosthesis and patients who use electrolarynx have similar scores (0.14±0.35; 0.15±0.36). The differences of the analyzed values were statistically significant (p<0.01). The results obtained in this research have shown that the patients who use tracheoesophageal vocal prosthesis have better achievement on the speech intelligibility test comparing to the esophageal patients and patients who use electrolarynx.

Keywords

• intelligibility
• esophageal speech
• tracheoesophageal speech
• electrolarynx