Intelligibility and Listening Effort of Spanish Oesophageal Speech

Abstract

Communication is a huge challenge for oesophageal speakers, be it for interactions with fellow humans or with digital voice assistants. We aim to quantify these communication challenges (both human-human and human-machine interactions) by measuring intelligibility and Listening Effort (LE) of Oesophageal Speech (OS) in comparison to Healthy Laryngeal Speech (HS). We conducted two listening tests (one web-based, the other in laboratory settings) to collect these measurements. Participants performed a sentence recognition and LE rating task in each test. Intelligibility, calculated as Word Error Rate, showed significant correlation with self-reported LE ratings. Speaker type (healthy or oesophageal) had a major effect on intelligibility and effort. More LE was reported for OS compared to HS even when OS intelligibility was close to HS. Listeners familiar with OS reported less effort when listening to OS compared to nonfamiliar listeners. However, such advantage of familiarity was not observed for intelligibility. Automatic speech recognition scores were higher for OS compared to HS.

An Auditory-Perceptual and Pupillometric Study of Vocal Strain and Listening Effort in Adductor Spasmodic Dysphonia

“…We acknowledge that this explanation is speculative, but it is in line with previous studies that report habituation secondary to repetition and exposure [32,33]. Furthermore, this explanation is consistent with findings from Raman et al [34] who reported that listening effort ratings from listeners who are familiar and exposed to abnormal voice samples (in their case, that of esophageal voices) are significantly lower when compared to similar ratings from naïve listeners. Given the speculative nature, further research is warranted to understand the relative contribution of cognitive load and emotional valence to pupillary responses when listening to disordered voice and speech samples.…”

Enrichment of Oesophageal Speech: Voice Conversion with Duration–Matched Synthetic Speech as Target

“…OS is less intelligible and more effortful to listen to compared to healthy speech (HS). This is evident from previous listening experiments [10,11] as well as acoustic characteristics and challenges of OS [12]. Prolonged exposure to effortful speech causes fatigue in listeners [13].…”

Editorial for Special Issue “IberSPEECH2018: Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages”

“…Improved knowledge will potentiate technologies and guide future research efforts. In this line, the article by Raman et al [12] contributes to a better understanding of the communication challenges faced by oesophageal speakers when interacting with other humans and machines, investigating Intelligibility and Listening Effort in comparison to healthy laryngeal speech. They observed that, despite intelligibility of oesophageal speech can be close to healthy laryngeal speech, it implies a greater listening effort, somewhat reduced for those familiar with it.…”