Electrolaryngeal speech produced by laryngectomized subjects: perceptual characteristics

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptual confusions individuals experience while listening to the speech of laryngectomized persons who used electrolarynges. Six talkers generated speech samples using two different models of electrolarynges. Intelligibility was evaluated from phonetic transcriptions of the speech samples. Confusion matrices were generated from the transcriptions. Talkers varied considerably in their intelligibility, but there was little difference in intelligibility for a given talker using either model of electrolarynx. The perceptual confusions revealed that most errors occurred on the voicing feature.