The correlation between nasalance and a differentiated perceptual rating of speech in Dutch patients with velopharyngeal insufficiency.

Objective: The correlation between the nasalance score and the perceptual rating of several aspects of speech of speakers with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) by six speech-language pathologists was evaluated.

Procedure: The overall grade of severity, hypernasality, audible nasal emission, misarticulations, and intelligibility were rated on visual analog scales. Speech samples with a normal distribution of phonemes (normal text [NT]) and those free of nasal consonants (denasal text [DT]) of 43 patients with VPI were used.