A soft-decision Ephraim-Malah suppression rule based speech enhancement algorithm is proposed for intelligibility enhancement in parametric speech coders. A glottal sensor is used to improve the intelligibility of a baseline system that uses only the acoustic microphone. The objective measure test shows that the proposed system decreases the spectral distortion by 2-3 dB for most phonetic classes. Moreover, significant improvements in DRT scores of nasality and sibilation features are obtained compared to the baseline system when the noise suppression systems are concatenated with a MELP based speech coder.