Assessment of three modes of alaryngeal speech with a synthetic sentence identification (SSI) task in varying message-to-competition ratios.

The intelligibility measures and listener preference rankings of pulmonary esophageal speech following tracheo-esophageal puncture (TEP) surgery were assessed relative to traditional esophageal speech, artificial laryngeal speech, and normal laryngeal speech. Intelligibility rankings were obtained with sentence length stimuli i the presence of a background competing message at varying message-to-competition ratios. Results for 20 normal-hearing adult subjects showed that although pulmonary esophageal speech was the most preferred of the alaryngeal speech modes, it was the least intelligible in the two most difficult listening conditions (-5-dB and -10-dB message-to-competition ratios).