Communicative Adaptations After Laryngectomy: Syntactic Complexity and Gesture Use

What is already known on this subject Total laryngectomy (TL) affects voice and speech, with rehabilitation often focusing on intelligibility and voice quality. Little is known about broader aspects of spoken language complexity and the role of co-speech gestures in communication after TL. What does this study add to existing knowledge TL patients differ from healthy controls in their use of fillers, mazes, and pauses, indicating managing the spoken-language disfluencies, while leaving syntactic complexity at similar levels than the controls, except for a slight difference in the number of words per C-unit. Despite these changes, TL patients use co-speech gestures in ways comparable to healthy controls. This suggests that gestures remain a stable communicative resource even when spoken language is affected. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Clinicians should recognize the preserved use of gestures as a compensatory strategy for communication after TL. Rehabilitation may benefit from explicitly integrating and training disfluencies and gestures into therapy and counseling to support communicative effectiveness.