The Eurocleft Speech Project: an outline of the results

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Eurocleft Speech Project was established in 1989 to investigate the speech performance of children from six centres in the Eurocleft Orthodontic Study. The project investigated the speech of 131 subjects, aged 11;0–14;0, born with unilateral cleft lip and palate (UCLP). A sampling procedure and an analytical framework were devised for the study which enabled comparisons to be made between the speech results for five European languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Norwegian and Swedish. The analytical framework identified characteristic error patterns in cleft palate speech and focused on the ‘vulnerable’ plosive and fricative consonants that are common to the five languages. The overall resonance characteristics of the subjects' speech were also evaluated. The results indicate good outcomes with regard to accuracy in consonant articulation across the whole population with common minor (subphonemic) errors in all languages for a minority of subjects. The results for resonance characteristics are less positive with slight hypernasality in 20% of subjects. Nonetheless, there are few indications of seriously disordered speech. There are no significant differences between centres. However, the detectable differences match the findings of the orthodontic study, especially in regard to ranking the centres. In addition to these findings, the Eurocleft Speech Project has identified principles and procedures for cross‐linguistic investigations of the speech performance of cleft palate individuals.