OBJECTIVE To achieve consistency and uniformity in reporting speech outcomes in individuals born with cleft palate with or without cleft lip using perceptual parameters that characterize their speech production behavior regardless of the language or languages spoken. DESIGN A working group of six individuals experienced in speech and cleft palate was formed to develop a system of universal pa...

OBJECTIVES Our study aimed to highlight the effectiveness of palatal lift prosthesis in patients with velopharyngeal insufficiency with previous operated cleft palate. METHODS This study was done undertaken January 2008 to December of 2009 in the Phoniatic unit of Alnoor Specialist Hospital, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Ten patients of ≥ 8 years to ≤ 10 years of age, who had previously undergone sur...

BACKGROUND The conventional method for uvular repair suturing the 2 hemi-uvulas of the palatal cleft together in the midline does not allow us to obtain a proper anatomical repair. In our hands, the midline straight closure frequently causes retraction of the uvular tissues with the consequent abnormal appearance of the uvula. We described before a method for uvular repair in patients with clef...

Objective: The goal of this study was to assess the correlation between nasal endoscopy and speech evaluation findings in a population 22q11.2DS patients undergoing operative intervention for correction VPI at quaternary care pediatric hospital. We hypothesized using modified grading scale, certain such as larger pre-operative velopharyngeal gap size would correlate with perceptual assessment d...

Although previous studies have reported the occurrence of velopharyngeal incompetence connected with ataxic dysarthria, there is a lack of evidence related to nasality assessment in cerebellar disorders. This is partly due to the limited reliability of challenging analyses and partly due to nasality being a less pronounced manifestation of ataxic dysarthria. Therefore, we employed 1/3-octave sp...

Dysarthria is a neuromotor impairment of speech that affects one or more of the speech sub-systems. It is reflected in the acoustic characteristics of the phonemes as deviations from their healthy counterparts. To capture these deviations, in this work a continuous speech, an isolated-style monophone-based, and a triphone-based speech recognition systems are developed. These speech recognition ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Hypernasality is considered a prevalent speech abnormality that could significantly contribute to the unintelligibility of the hearing-impaired speakers. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of cochlear implantation and the duration of hearing loss on nasalance of speech of a postlingually impaired group of Saudi adult patients. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective stu...

OBJECTIVES To describe the perceptual speech outcomes from the Cleft Care UK (CCUK) study and compare them to the 1998 Clinical Standards Advisory Group (CSAG) audit. SETTING AND SAMPLE POPULATION A cross-sectional study of 248 children born with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate, between 1 April 2005 and 31 March 2007 who underwent speech assessment. MATERIALS AND METHODS Centre-bas...

UNLABELLED Patients with palatine fissure have inadequate velopharyngeal closure (VPC), with consequent vocal hypernasality which can be reduced by a basal tone. AIM To compare VPC during a basal tone with the emission of a modal recording, in patients with repaired post-foramen palatine fissure. MATERIALS AND METHODS Case study with four adult men, all with repaired post-foramen palatine f...

AIMS The purpose of this study was to describe articulation and resonance characteristics of Ugandan English-speaking children with cleft lip and palate (CLP) after synchronous lip and palatal closure (Sommerlad technique) prior to the age of 6 months in comparison with an age- and gender-matched control group. METHODS Eleven Ugandan patients with CLP (mean age 4;9 years), repaired during a s...