Abstract
Extensive surgical resection for carcinoma of the tongue have yielded high cure rates. However, they result in considerable articulation disorders. In our department, HIRANO and his colleagues developed a combination therapy consisting of laser surgery and chemo radiotherapy for the purpose of minimizing post-therapeutic articulatory disorders. This study compares post-therapeutic speech intelligibility of 100 Japanese monosyllables fol lowing laser-chemo-radiotherapy (laser group, 12 cases) and that following extensive surgery (extensive surgery group, 20 cases). The results are as follows: 1. The speech intelligibility was significantly higher in the laser group (84.4-94.8%, 91.3% in average) than in the extensive surgery group (28.2-92.0%, 69.5% in average). 2. In the laser group and the extensive surgery group, the speech intelligibility was significantly lower for “yo-on” than for “choku-on”. 3. In both treatment groups the intelligibility of vowel syllables and semi vowel syllables was higher than that of other syllables. 4. With respect to the place of articulation, glottal sounds had a higher intelligibility than the other sounds such as bilabial, alveolar, palatal and velar sounds. Considering the difficulty in determining the intelligibility of 100 monosyllables, the author proposes a 25-monosyllable list for clinical use.
