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

Abstract

Oesophageal speakers face a multitude of challenges, such asdifficulty in basic everyday communication and inability to in-teract with digital voice assistants. We aim to quantify the diffi-culty involved in understanding oesophageal speech (in human-human and human-machine interactions) by measuring intel-ligibility and listening effort. We conducted a web-based lis-tening test to collect these metrics. Participants were asked totranscribe and then rate the sentences for listening effort on a5-point Likert scale. Intelligibility, calculated as Word ErrorRate (WER), showed significant correlation with user rated ef-fort. Speaker type (healthy or oesophageal) had a major effecton intelligibility and effort. Listeners familiar with oesophagealspeech did not have any advantage over non familiar listeners incorrectly understanding oesophageal speech. However, they re-ported lesser effort in listening to oesophageal speech comparedto non familiar listeners. Additionally, we calculated speaker-wise mean WERs and they were significantly lower when com-pared to an automatic speech recognition system