Development and validation of a comprehensive assessment questionnaire for Cantonese alaryngeal speakers' speech performance

Abstract

The study devised and validated the perceptual assessment questionnaire for evaluating the speech performance of Cantonese alaryngeal speakers. Forty-eight male alaryngeal speakers participated in the study: 10 electrolaryngeal, 10 esophageal, 9 tracheoesophageal, 9 pneumatic artificial and 10 normal laryngeal speakers. Five speech therapists also participated in the perceptual rating procedures. Results indicated moderate to strong inter-rater reliability in all parameters that involve only auditory judgment except that of rating electrolarynx noise. Assessment parameters that require both auditory and visual judgment might require further modification. For tone perception, moderate to strong inter-rater reliability was also noted. High intra-rater reliability of the assessment questionnaire was also found. In addition, the parameters adopted were reported to have significant correlation with the acoustic correlates except that for pitch rating. The assessment questionnaire suggested appeared to be valid for evaluating auditory dependent speech characteristics of the four types of alaryngeal speech.