Longitudinal Acoustic Analysis of /s/ in Head and Neck Cancer Patients Treated With Surgery

Oral and oropharyngeal cancer and its treatment can have a devastating impact on speech. The goal of this study is to characterize the changes in English sibilant /s/ production associated with resection site and the sex and age of the patients following surgical removal of oral and oropharyngeal tumors.

The acoustics of 4,371 productions of /s/ from read continuous speech of 89 patients (66 men, 23 women) with an mean age of 58.2 years (range: 22-82) were analyzed before and after surgery for oral and/or oropharyngeal cancer. The center of gravity (COG) of the fricative power spectrum was analyzed with a linear mixed-effects model with assessment time (pre-operative and 1, 6, and 12 months postoperative), age, sex, and proportion of resections (%) within oral and pharyngeal structures as fixed effects and random intercepts for speaker and phonetic context.

Before surgery, male sex and older age were associated with lower COG. After surgery, COG was reduced with partial recovery at 1 year and dropped more for females than males. Overall, recovery was better among those who did not have radiation. At 1 year, the COG of /s/ was most impacted by resections to the tongue (without radiation), followed by resections to the velopharyngeal mechanism (with radiation). The additional effect of radiation treatment was modulated by age.

The results suggest partial recovery of speech function at 1 year. The recovery was gendered with females remaining further away from the pretreatment values after surgery compared to the males.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.31953024.