Psycholinguistic Abilities of Children with Clefts

Abstract

Historically, the literature on the subject of cleft palate has been con— cerned primarily with the adequacy of the speech endproduct as evaluated by listeners. A long list of studies has attempted to describe the speech output in terms of the defective elements which make it acousti— cally different from normal speech. Only recently have investigators directed their attention beyond the mechanics of speech to the fundamental language structures and behavior patterns which are basic to all forms of communication. Morris (6) studied 107 cleft palate children between the ages of two and fifteen years. He reported that, as a group, the subjects demonstrated an overall reduction on a number of measures of language skill. The children were less adequate than their controls on such measures as the Ammons Picture Vocabulary Test, the vocabulary subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, mean length of response, struc— tural complexity, variety of word selections, and articulation skills. The cleft palate children were also found to be significantly more variable in the length of their responses, and there was a tendency for them to use more one-word responses than did the normal children. These findings lead one to conclude that children with clefts are significantly retarded in communication skills and that the consequences of cleft lip and palate have implications to the communicative process that cannot be explained on the basis of an anatomical defect alone. Earlier (11) we speculated that these evidences of expressive language problems might be related to What the child viewed as defective speech patterns which he was more or less reluctant to reveal. Results of the study indicated that children with clefts functioned less creatively on both verbal and nonverbal tasks than did their controls and that children with clefts were experiencing difficulty in several expressive modalities. Shames and his associates (10) have created a language battery which Dr.