An automatic version of the post-laryngectomy telephone test

Abstract

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is a possibility to restore the ability to speak after total laryngectomy, i.e. the removal of the larynx. The quality of the substitute voice has to be evaluated during therapy. For the intelligibility evaluation of German speakers over telephone, the Post-Laryngectomy Telephone Test (PLTT) was defined. Each patient reads out 20 of 400 different monosyllabic words and 5 out of 100 sentences. A human listener writes down the words and sentences understood and computes an overall score. This paper presents a means of objective and automatic evaluation that can replace the subjective method. The scores of 11 naïve raters for a set of 31 test speakers were compared to the word recognition rate of speech recognizers. Correlation values of about 0.9 were reached. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.