Objective Evaluation and Therapy of Speech in Children with Cleft Palate

Kim, Hyun-Gi

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2001;5(2): 1-16.

Hyun-Gi Kim^`

김현기(Hyun-Gi Kim)

ABSTRACT

Children with cleft palate often show speech problems even though they received early surgical operation. The typical speech problems of children with cleft palate are the resonance disorder , voice disorder and articulation disorder . The speech evaluation of cleft palate has been tested by subjective methods. The aim of present study was to obtain acoustic data of cleft palate speaker s. One hundred and fifteen normal children and 33 children with cleft palate participated in this study. Nasometer , Spectrography and Visi-Pitch were used to measure the hypernasality, voice color and voice quality separately. The acoustic characteristics of the speech in children with cleft palates were found as follows: (1) More than 50 % of the subject s with cleft palate showed the nasalance of the high vowel / i/ ; (2) the VOT of cleft - palate subject s was two times longer than that of normal children; (3) the maximum phonation time of children with cleft palate was about half of that of normal children; (4) the jitter of children with cleft palate was over 1.3 %; (5) the diadochokinetic rate of children with cleft palate was one- half of that of normal children.