Language Skills of Preschool Cleft Palate Children

Abstract

Although feeding, adjustment, and speech are listed as primary difficulties evidenced by cleft palate children, authors of clinical textbooks on speech pathology frequently do not present the development of verbal language skills as a major problem (2, 4, 10, 22, 23). Their discussions of speech generally are limited to the production of sound for communication and exclude basic aspects of receptive and expressive verbal language development. While there has been a paucity of systematic research about the de— velopment of language in cleft palate children, that which has been done suggests that aspects of verbal language in addition to speech production deserve the attention of the clinician. Bzoch (5) found that 50% of the mothersof 60 cleft palate subjects reported delays in babbling, jargon, use of the first word, and use of the first two-word sentence. Spriestersbach and others (19) reported on 40 cleft palate children, ages two to eight years. When the McCarthy procedures were used to evaluate language, those authors found that these children were retarded in mean length of response, but that, as a group, they did not evidence retardation in structural complexity. Twenty two of the children were given the WISC vocabulary subtest, and were found to be retarded in language usage. In a more detailed study, Morris (14) evaluated verbal language comprehension using the Ammons, verbal output using the McCarthy procedures, and language usage (vocabulary definition) using the WISC vocabulary subtest. The 107 subjects, ranging in age from two to 16 years, were found to be retarded When compared to the published normative data for these various measures. More recently, Smith and McWilliams (18) administered the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistics to 136 cleft palate children, ages three to eight years. These children not only showed a depression in all nine areas of language evaluated but also showed a tendency to progressively poorer Dr.