Judging speech communication effectiveness in oral cancer patients

An experiment was conducted to assess the effects of different types of sentences and recording methods on naive judges' evaluations of the speech communication effectiveness of four patients who had undergone surgery for oral cancer. As expected, judges understood patients better if they read meaningful rather than meaningless sentences and if their speech was evaluated under video rather than audio conditions. However, these general findings were qualified because of the powerful influence of individual differences among patients. For example, whereas the intelligibility of three of the patients increased under the audio condition if the sentences being read were meaningful, one patient was poorly understood no matter what type of sentence he read under the same condition. The results suggested that the identification of the unique personality characteristics of patients that are related to their intelligibility merits serious consideration by both researchers and rehabilitation clinicians.