Age of Surgery for Cleft Palate Patients and Speech Proficiency

Abstract

b'or years professional workers with cleft palate children have at— tempted to isolate factors that govern the surgeon's decision about the best age for cleft palate repair (I, 2, 6', 8, 11). In a classical state— ment, Morley (.9) indicated that there were three factors to be con— sidered in deciding the best age for surgery: survival, oral-facial growth, and speech development. The present study was designed to provide information about the question: What is the correlation between the age of surgery and the resultant speech of the patient? A secondary purpose of the reseach was to obtain data about type of cleft, degree of hearing loss and to report relationships, if any, between these two variables. Procedure SUBJECTS. Fifty-three subjects (34 males and 19 females) were chosen from a list of surgical patients of one surgeon during an eight-year period of time. Patients of a single surgeon were used in order to control variance in surgical procedure. The variability of one surgeon, even over an eight—year period, seems less than that between individual surgeons over a shorter period of time. When the speech samples were collected (in 1966), no subjects were younger than 5 years of age. This minimum age restriction was used to insure that subjects were beyond their primary articulation and language learning stages. Some children age 5 years, or even older, may still have maturational speech problems which could influence their speech ratings. However, it was felt that for the purposes of this study the level of maturation for these subjects was sufficiently advanced. All the patients had had surgery prior to March 1962. The mean age at the time of surgery was 3 years, 2 months; the range was from 9 months to 12 years, 8