Assessment of impairment of intelligibility and of speech signal after oral cavity and oropharynx cancer

Abstract Background Perceptual evaluation is a means of assessing speech disorder severity in clinical practice. Although limited in reliability and reproducibility, its ease of application makes it very widely used. Choice of assessment criteria and type of speech sample are key points. Objective To compare a panel's perceptual evaluations on two tasks with different criteria. Material and method The corpus comprised 87 samples from patients treated for oral cavity or oropharynx cancer, assessed by 6 experts on two criteria (impairment of intelligibility and of speech signal) and two kinds of speech sample (semi-spontaneous versus reading speech) Results Although strong correlations were found between tasks ( r  > 0.8), the speech signal criterion gave a score distribution providing a better metric. Severity was greater in oral cavity (mean, 5.44 ± 2.47) than oropharyngeal cancer (6.46 ± 2.24). Semi-spontaneous speech tended to show less severity score ceiling effect than reading speech (mean, 6.06/10 for picture description and 6.51/10 for reading). Conclusion Speech signal impairment in semi-spontaneous speech seems to be the best clinical measure to assess speech disorder following treatment of oral cavity or oropharynx cancer.