Articulation Proficiency and Error Patterns of Preschool Cleft Palate and Normal Children

Abstract

The importance of articulation disabilities for several groups of cleft palate individuals has been emphasized in several research reports in the periodical literature (2, 5, .9, 14, 18). The frequent early appearance of distinctive patterns of articulation errors (3, 18) in groups of young cleft palate children and the frequent persistence of such syndromes of articula-tion errors in older groups (5, 19) indicate the need for systematic analysis of differences in the maturing articulation skills of children born with velopharyngeal incompetencies and comparable normal children. The present study was carried out as part of a broader investigation (2) comparing a large number of factors on similar groups of cleft palate children and children born without cleft palate. The data from that study, describing differences in articulation skills and specific articulation errors, have been valuable in providing a rationale for retaining young cleft palate children and for designing clinical studies of the efficacy of various surgi— cal and prosthetic findings of the comparative study of early articulation skills. Those findings are presented and discussed here in the hope that they might stimulate further and more limited research on the speech of young cleft palate children. Methods of Procedure SUBJECTs. Sixty cleft palate children were selected on the basis of age and cleft-type. All subjects had clefts involving the secondary palate (hard and soft palate posterior to the incisive foramina) or some combination of both primary and secondary palate (11). Subjects Whose clefts involved the primary palate only were excluded from this study. Cleft palate children between three and seven years of age were selected so that there were ten children in each of the six half-year ranges covered by the study, making a total of 60 children. The finally—selected group included 37 males and 23 females. All subjects were under the care of either the Northwestern University