lh b e a sence of teeth creates difficulties in the articulation of certain speech sounds. Some patients do not exhibit any speech problem, because it appears that the tongue makes compensatory adjustments for the absence of the teeth. Allen1 has stated that a patient fitted with complete dentures generally adjusts his speech pattern to the new appliance and thus improves. Martone reported that older patients when fitted with complete dentures show a resistance to speech improvement. Conflicting data exist regarding the type of speech improvement and whether the improvement, if any, is associated with specific sounds or with a general over-all quality of the voice. Kaire? and YlppG and Sovij%vi4 reported that, in the absence of dentures, the concentration of the higher frequencies in the over-all acoustic spectrum of speech was reduced. During speech production, formant regions were found to be lowered when dentures were not present. These formant regions rose when dentures were inserted. The primary aim of this study was to assess speech changes in complete denture patients ( 1) in the edentulous state, (2) immediately following denture insertion, (3) two weeks following the insertion of the dentures, and (4) twelve weeks following the insertion of the dentures. A secondary aim was to relate the assessment of speech samples to spectrographic portrayal. The phonemes /s/, /sh/, /t/, and the voiced /th/ were examined by trained speech therapists using the method of paired comparison.