Listening to Laryngectomees: A study of Intelligibility and Self-reported Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

Abstract

Oesophageal speakers face a multitude of challenges, such as difficulty in basic everyday communication and inability to interact with digital voice assistants. We aim to quantify the difficulty involved in understanding oesophageal speech (in humanhuman and human-machine interactions) by measuring intelligibility and listening effort. We conducted a web-based listening test to collect these metrics. Participants were asked to transcribe and then rate the sentences for listening effort on a 5-point Likert scale. Intelligibility, calculated as Word Error Rate (WER), showed significant correlation with user rated effort. Speaker type (healthy or oesophageal) had a major effect on intelligibility and effort. Listeners familiar with oesophageal speech did not have any advantage over non familiar listeners in correctly understanding oesophageal speech. However, they reported lesser effort in listening to oesophageal speech compared to non familiar listeners. Additionally, we calculated speakerwise mean WERs and they were significantly lower when compared to an automatic speech recognition system.

Intelligibility and Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

“…The main task for this web-based experiment [32] was the sentence recall and transcription task. Participants listened to a sentence and then typed what they had understood.…”

Enrichment of Oesophageal Speech: Voice Conversion with Duration–Matched Synthetic Speech as Target

“…OS is less intelligible and more effortful to listen to compared to healthy speech (HS). This is evident from previous listening experiments [10,11] as well as acoustic characteristics and challenges of OS [12]. Prolonged exposure to effortful speech causes fatigue in listeners [13].…”

A Spanish multispeaker database of esophageal speech

“…Subjective evaluation of the quality and intelligibility of alaryngeal speech to improve diagnosis and therapy is also possible with these recordings, because the number and variety of individuals is considerably high. A preliminary study of the intelligibility and listening effort for AhoSLABI was conducted in [64].…”