Speech intelligibility after repair of cleft lip and palate. 2017

Azadeh Safaiean, and Nahid Jalilevand, and Mona Ebrahimipour, and Elham Asleshirin, and Mehran Hiradfar
Department of Speech and Language Pathology, Varastegan Institute of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran.

Background: Intelligibility refers to understandability of speech; and lack of it can negatively affect children's overall communication effectiveness. Children with repaired cleft lip and/or cleft palate (CL/P) may experience poor speech intelligibility. This study aimed at evaluating speech intelligibility in children with repaired CL/P who had not been referred to speech-language pathology clinics for early intervention. Methods: Sixty-four monolingual Persian-speaking children, 32 children with repaired CL/P, and 32 controls aged 3 to 5 years participated in this survey. Their speech intelligibility was evaluated through the Persian Speech Intelligibility Test and was normalized on children 3 to 5 years. Each speech sample was heard by a speech and language pathologist (SLP), as well as 2 nonprofessional listeners. Two objective measures of speech intelligibility including Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) and Percentage of Intelligible Words (PIW) were used in this research. Results: Children with CL/P were significantly outperformed by their peers in PCC (p= 0.0001) and PIW (p= 0.0001). More than half of the case group had compensatory errors and 40.6% had obligatory errors. The PCC and the PIW were statistically different in children with different rates of hyper nasality (p= 0.001). Conclusion: Speech intelligibility of children with CL/P is impaired due to their articulation disorders (obligatory and compensatory errors). This survey documents the necessity for speech therapy for increasing speech intelligibility in this population.

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