The Effect of Clear Speech on Cantonese Alaryngeal Speakers' Intelligibility.
Tak Fai Hui, Steven Randall Cox, Ting Huang and 2 others
PMID 34333487WHAT IT FOUND
Male Cantonese laryngectomees told to overarticulate and slow down had better sentence intelligibility than in habitual speech: scores rose by 9.1% with electrolarynx, 8.9% with esophageal speech, and 1.4% with tracheoesophageal speech.
Key findings
01Clear speech significantly improved sentence intelligibility scores overall.
02Speakers used a significantly slower rate in clear speech than habitual speech, averaging 2.11 versus 2.89 syllables per second.
03Intelligibility increased by 9.1% for electrolarynx users, 8.9% for esophageal speakers, and 1.4% for tracheoesophageal speakers.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 31 male Cantonese speakers were included, and all listeners were female, so results may not generalise to women or other languages. Proficiency was not experimentally controlled; speakers were referred by one experienced speech therapist and had used their method for 3 months to 25 years. Clear speech was elicited with brief prerecorded instructions and up to two demonstrations, not a full training programme. Only two naive listeners judged intelligibility, and agreement between them was moderate. Some speakers may already have used clear speech in the habitual condition, and acoustic features such as vowel formants were not checked. The discussion states 32 speakers while the methods report 31. The paper describes preliminary data and calls for larger heterogeneous studies.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The corresponding author is an Associate Editor of the journal. The article is marked as NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that clear speech is an established treatment for all laryngectomees, or that electrolarynx users benefit significantly more than tracheoesophageal users. The overall intelligibility gain was significant (p = 0.047), but the difference between alaryngeal methods was not (p = 0.574), and the study used brief instructions, only male Cantonese speakers and two listeners.