Meaningful speech assessment is vital in clinical phonetics and therapy monitoring. This study examined the link between perceptual speech assessments and objective acoustic measures in a large head and neck cancer (HNC) dataset. Trained listeners provided ratings of intelligibility, articulation, voice quality, phonation, speech rate, nasality, and background noise on speech. Strong correlations were found between subjective intelligibility, articulation, and voice quality, likely due to a shared underlying cause of speech symptoms in our speaker population. Objective measures of intelligibility and speech rate aligned with their subjective counterpart. Our results suggest that a single intelligibility measure may be sufficient for the clinical monitoring of speakers treated for HNC using concomitant chemoradiation.

翻译：有意义的言语评估在临床语音学及治疗监测中至关重要。本研究在一个大型头颈癌（HNC）数据集中考察了言语感知评估与客观声学测量之间的关联。经过训练的听评员对言语样本的可懂度、清晰度、嗓音质量、发声方式、语速、鼻音度及背景噪声进行了评级。研究发现主观可懂度、清晰度与嗓音质量之间存在强相关性，这可能源于我们说话者群体中言语症状存在共同的潜在病因。可懂度与语速的客观测量结果与其主观评价具有一致性。我们的结果表明，对于接受同步放化疗治疗的HNC患者，单一的言语可懂度测量可能足以满足临床监测需求。