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

Jugement d'altération de l'intelligibilité et de sévérité d'un trouble de la production de la parole séquellaire d'un cancer de la cavité buccale ou de l'oropharynx

Mathieu Balaguer (1) , Aline Boisguérin , Anaïs Galtier (2) , Nadège Gaillard , Michèle Puech , Virginie Woisard (3)

1 CHU Toulouse - Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse
2 IUCT Oncopole - UMR 1037 - Institut Universitaire du Cancer de Toulouse - Oncopole
3 Octogone-Lordat - Unité de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Octogone-Lordat

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 orophar-ynx 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.

Domaines: Cancer; Médecine humaine et pathologie

Mathieu Balaguer, Aline Boisguérin, Anaïs Galtier, Nadège Gaillard, Michèle Puech, et al.. Jugement d'altération de l'intelligibilité et de sévérité d'un trouble de la production de la parole séquellaire d'un cancer de la cavité buccale ou de l'oropharynx. European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Diseases, 2019, 136 (5), pp.355 - 359. ⟨10.1016/j.anorl.2019.05.012⟩. ⟨hal-02505359⟩