Task of Acoustic-phonetic Decoding on Anatomic Deficits in Paramedical Assessment of Speech Disorders for Patients Treated for Oral or Oropharyngeal Cancer

Speech Intelligibility

speech deficit, tumor pathologies of the upper aero-digestive tract

The bridging of the gap between speech production and perception by the interlocutor would be made possible by the use of a more suitable and automatic task. An acoustic-phonetic decoding test (or DAP in French, i.e. the production of isolated pseudo-words in repetition or reading), created within the framework of the The French National Cancer Institute (InCA) C2SI project, avoids the effects of cognitive restoration by the interlocutor. An automatic score from the DAP would lead to an overall score per patient, but also to scores specific to each phonetic segment, to be correlated with the analytical scores from each anatomical oropharyngeal segment. The study hypothesis is that the automatic processing of an acoustic-phonetic decoding task during the assessment in current practice is a valid and reliable tool for diagnosing oropharyngeal analytical and dynamic deficits by highlighting deficient linguistic units. The study hypothesis is that the automatic processing of an acoustico-phonetic decoding task during the assessment in current practice is a tool for diagnosing oropharyngeal analytical and dynamic deficits by highlighting deficient linguistic units.

Fifth cancer in terms of incidence in France, tumor pathologies of the upper aero-digestive tract, due to their location, impact the speech abilities of affected subjects. Speech therapy in paramedical clinical assessments consist of two parts. * The analytical part to highlight the anatomical and dynamic deficits of segments involved in speech. * The functional part characterizes the pathophysiological impact by means of an ear assessment. The link between anatomy and functional speech deficit is very close in oncology (the location and the size of the tumor, the structural changes due to the treatment who modify the oropharyngeal dynamics and the mechanisms involved in the production of the speech), but the correlation is weak between functional intelligibility scores and analytical motor scores. Indeed, the perception of speech by a human listener is not a simple recording of the production, but a representation of this production after implementation of individual mechanisms for restoring the acoustic information linked to the lexicon or to the context by the listener. The listener's degree of familiarity with the speaker or his pathology is also a source of variability. The bridging of the gap between speech production and perception by the interlocutor would be made possible by the use of a more suitable and automatic task. An acoustic-phonetic decoding test (or DAP in French, i.e. the production of isolated pseudo-words in repetition or reading), created within the framework of the InCA C2SI project, avoids the effects of cognitive restoration by the interlocutor. An automatic score from the DAP would lead to an overall score per patient, but also to scores specific to each phonetic segment, to be correlated with the analytical scores from each anatomical oropharyngeal segment. The study hypothesis is that the automatic processing of an acoustic-phonetic decoding task during the assessment in current practice is a valid and reliable tool for diagnosing oropharyngeal analytical and dynamic deficits by highlighting deficient linguistic units.

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