Nasalance measures in Marathi consonant-vowel-consonant syllables with pressure consonants produced by children with and without cleft lip and palate.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether there exist differential nasalance measures for consonant-vowel-consonant syllables consisting of different pressure consonants articulated by Marathi-speaking children with and without repaired cleft lip and palate.

Participants: Ten Marathi-speaking children with repaired cleft palate between the ages of 5 and 12 years formed the experimental group. The control group consisted of 10 age- and sex-matched children with no clefts and no history of any hearing, speech, or voice disorder.

Methods And Materials: The Kay Elemetrics nasometer model 6200-2 (IBM-PC version) was used for obtaining nasalance measurements. Speech material consisted of eight Marathi monosyllabic words consisting of the pressure consonants in the initial position. The correlation between perceptual judgments of nasality and the instrumental measures was studied by computing the Phi coefficient.

Results: Results indicate that there exist differential mean nasalance scores for the syllables with different pressure consonants articulated by Marathi-speaking subjects with repaired cleft lip and palate and those without cleft lip and palate. Correlation coefficient computed between the instrumental measures and the perceptual judgments of nasality indicates moderate correlation between the two measures.

Conclusions: Presence of differential nasalance scores may have diagnostic and therapeutic implications. Results also emphasize the need to evaluate nasal resonance in stimuli other than the traditional ones.