Current status of laryngectomee rehabilitation: III. understanding of esophageal speech.

To assess those aspects of esophageal speech that contribute to effective communication, a series of measures were applied to the esophageal speech of a prospectively studied group of recent laryngectomees (n = 20) six months following completion of their cancer therapy and to that of a second group (n = 27) studied retrospectively 6.6 years postoperatively. Ages of the two groups did not differ, but there were more whites and more males in the group studied retrospectively. The technical proficiency of the subjects studied prospectively was slightly but significantly less than that of those studied retrospectively. Measures of technical proficiency correlated well with other measures of quality of esophageal speech and were much easier to perform. The understandability of the esophageal speech of the group studied retrospectively was significantly superior. For both groups, understandability was enhanced significantly during audiovisual compared with audio-only presentations. Naive judges had great variability in understanding esophageal speech.