Palatalized Articulation as a Type of Cleft Palate Speech

Abstract

The palatalized articulation for the dental and alveolar sounds has been reported as a type of articulation errors in the cleft palate speech. In the present paper, articulatory tongue gestures for this particular type of error were observed by the use of dynamic palatograph and cineradiograph.The subjects were 9 postoperative cleft palate patients with this type of articulation error, 5 males and 4 females, ranging from 5 to 23 years old. Among the 9 subjects, 2 were observed by cineradiograph and 8 by dynamic palatograph.The result revealed the tongue gestures were characterized by the articulatory contact of the back of the tongue, instead of the tip or the blade, to the posterior end of the hard palate. The tongue-palate contact was clearly different from that for the normally palatalized /s/ which is represented as [∫] in Japanese. Sound spectrograms of the fricative sound produced by this abnormally palatalized articulation showed a marked decrease in the noise energy in the high frequency range as compared to the [s] or [∫] . The results supported the previous report where characteristic features of this articulation error were described mainly by auditory analysis and by limited visual observations from the mouth opening.Articulation training was administered to the patients in order to replace the faulty articulation by the correct gestures for the dental and alveolar sounds. The tongue-palate contact pattern which was nearly identical to that in normal subjects was observed when the patient reached the clinically acceptable goal.