Articulation Assessment for Tongue Cancer Patients: Using Consonant Production Performance to Capture Speech Deficits

The purpose of this study was to thoroughly analyze postoperative consonant errors by tongue cancer (TC) patients with speech disorders and also to investigate the correlation between the pathological factors and the speech performance using our Consonant-based Articulation Assessment Battery (CAAB).

The participants were 57 monolingual Mandarin TC patients (26 women, 31 men) after surgery (aged 20-80 years). All participants were literate and had normal vision and hearing, enabling them to comprehend and comply with our instructions. In order to quickly evaluate their articulation performance based on the place and manner of articulation, they were instructed to pronounce the characters in CAAB. The analysis removed speech samples impacted by speakers' dialects, while recording and documenting all other responses.

The study uncovered a significant correlation between pathological factors (e.g., size of tongue resection, specific resection site, and tumor size) and the accuracy of consonant articulation. Furthermore, tongue damage predominantly impacts the place of articulation (63.85%) than the manner of articulation (20.78%). The damage in the anterior part of the tongue has the most prominent influence on consonant production.

CAAB can fast capture the idiosyncratic characteristics of speech production by TC patients, and the articulation deficits are quite different from other types of organic or nonorganic speech disorders, for example, cleft lip and cleft palate. Hence, CAAB can be designated as an assessment tool for articulation disorders caused by stomatognathic damages. Our findings also shed light on the possible oral cancer surgery plan and the postoperative speech rehabilitation training.