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Treatment of oral and oropharyngeal cancer affects the anatomical regions involved in speech production. It has a major impact on patients' quality of life because it degrades communicational functions [1]. Despite this observation, little research is currently carried out on the functional impact of speech disorders. Previous studies have only found moderate correlations between quality of life and speech disorder severity scores, derived from a perceptual assessment [2]. This might be explained by the biases associated with standard perceptual speech evaluation, in terms of intra- and inter-rater reliability. In this context, the development of tools for automatic speech signal processing seems to be fully relevant [3].

The objective of this study is to analyze the correlations between patients' quality of life and the speech disorder severity scores, assessed perceptually and automatically.

The database used was the one from the C2SI project [2]. Eighty-seven patients treated for oral or oropharyngeal cancer were recruited. They filled out an overall quality-of-life questionnaire including a "social role functioning" dimension (MOS SF-36 "SF36-SF", [4]), but also two specific questionnaires related to speech [5, 6]. Their speech was then recorded on different tasks. A jury of six experts perceptually assessed the quality of speech and gave a score for the severity of the speech disorder on a semi-spontaneous task of picture description (ranging from 0 – no impairment – to 10 – maximum impairment). An automatic speech signal analysis allowed the calculation of a speech severity score (on pseudowords repetition, text reading and a …