Voice intelligibility in patients who have undergone laryngectomies

In this paper, we evaluate the speech intelligibility of two groups of Spanish-speaking people who have undergone laryngectomies: a group who used esophageal speech and a group who used tracheoesophageal (TES) prostheses. Audio recordings of 24 Spanish words produced by each talker were presented to a group of normal-hearing naive listeners who phonetically transcribed their responses. Listeners' responses were registered in confusion matrices. Results indicate that differences between these two groups of patients appear when we consider phoneme types. The difficulty in producing the voicing distinction appeared in both TES and esophageal talkers. This finding is consistent with studies of English-speaking laryngectomized patients. Considering manner of production, fricative consonants had the highest number of confusions with other phoneme class in the TES group, whereas in the esophageal group nasals resulted the highest number of confusions. However, ANOVA showed that differences between the two groups were not significant.