14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Speech Production after Tongue Surgery and Tongue Reconstruction

Pascal Perrier (1), Christophe Savariaux (1), Jacques Lebeau (2), Gustavo Magaña (2)

(1) Institut de la Communication Parlée, UPRESA CNRS 5009 INPG and Univ. Stendhal, Grenoble, France
(2) Service de Chirurgie Plastique et Maxillo-Faciale, CHU Grenoble, France

This study is part of a larger project consisting in observing the ability of 14 French speaking patients to re-organize their speech production apparatus, after tongue surgery including partial or total glossectomy and tongue reconstruction or partial mandibulectomy. They were asked to pronounce a corpus including French vowels and VCV sequences. Data analysis was based on formant patterns for the vowels, and on the burst spectrum together with the VOT for the consonants. Different degrees of impairment were observed during the production of the vowels which led to the classification of the patients into 3 main groups. Consonant analysis was carried out in relation with these 3 main groups. The results were interpreted both in terms of the representation that the patients have of their speech production task and in terms of the articulatory correlates of the impediment of speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Perrier, Pascal / Savariaux, Christophe / Lebeau, Jacques / Magaña, Gustavo (1999): "Speech production after tongue surgery and tongue reconstruction", In ICPhS-14, 1805-1808.