Perceptual evaluation of tracheoesophageal speech: Is it a reliable tool?

Perceptual voice evaluation is a common clinical tool for rating the severity of vocal quality impairment. It has been used in research as a gold standard for comparison with acoustic and aerodynamics measurements. Nevertheless, it has disadvantages in the form of being time-consuming, a group of raters is needed and last but not the least it is a subjective manner of evaluation. Intraobserver and interobserver reliability is an important issue in perceptual evaluations. Different perceptual scales have been developed to describe the quality of a patient's voice but none is internationally accepted. Although not entirely comprehensive, perceptual evaluations will be used as a standard against which other measures will be evaluated. Data were collected by conducting a computer-aided search of the MED-LINE and PUBMED databases, supplemented by hand searches of key journals. More than 50 articles in the last three decades on the topic have been reviewed out of which approximately 31 were found to be relevant to this article.