Communication competence and disability secondary to laryngectomy and tracheoesophageal puncture voice restoration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is a large body of research showing the negative impact of a total laryngectomy on the resultant voice signal across multiple outcomes (e.g., speech intelligibility/acceptability, listener comprehension, voice quality). However, there is limited information on the effects of laryngectomy on broader communication acts, particularly in the area of pragmatics, commonly referred to as the social use of language. Considering that individuals with a laryngectomy (IWL) frequently report reduced quality of life as well as reduced communicative competency, expanding the current research to include pragmatics is warranted. AIM: To explore the pragmatic changes in communication experienced by tracheoesophageal speakers. METHODS & PROCEDURES: The current study adapted an existing 17-item measure to assess verbal, non-verbal, paralinguistic and receptive communication competence via self-report. This adapted measure was then distributed to 65 tracheoesophageal speakers (52 males, 13 females, mean age = 63.4 ± 8.5 years). OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Both negative and positive pragmatic changes to communication were reported by participants secondary to laryngectomy. This included changes in verbal (negative -37.5%, positive -15.15%); non-verbal (negative -9.54%, positive -35.45%; and paralinguistic acts (negative -29.55%, positive -34.09%). Changes to receptive communication were also noted (negative -14.78%, positive -43.19%). CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The overall results suggest that communication changes post-laryngectomy exist well beyond the paralinguistic areas (e.g., intelligibility, voice quality) and that males and females may approach or respond to changes in communication differently. Results are discussed specific to clinical intervention and the importance of including assessment of pragmatic function post-laryngectomy. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject While there is a large body of research on the changes to the speaker and listener following laryngectomy, there is minimal information on how the use of alaryngeal speech affects overall communication, specifically in the area of pragmatics or the social use of language. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study used an adapted version of the widely used Pragmatic Protocol to delineate changes in pragmatic components of communication for tracheoesophageal speakers. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Clinically, this information can be used by healthcare professionals to educate and prepare IWL on potential changes in the underrecognized area of pragmatics.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".