Prevalence of compensatory misarticulation errors in children with cleft lip/palate

Introduction: Cleft lip and/or cleft palate comprise a group of the structural disorders that can affect speech intelligibility and communicative functions. Velopharyngeal insufficiency and compensatory misarticulations (CMAs) are considered as common problems among children with Cleft lip/ palate. This research aimed at determining the prevalence of compensatory misarticulations in preschoolers in order to establish a foundation for future studies on the subject.Materials and Methods: In a cross-sectional descriptive study, 31 affected children with an age range of 3 to 7 years were recruited from speech therapy clinics of Isfahan-Iran according to entrance criteria. To determine frequent CMA types, a word- repeating task was used. The task’s items were selected from an articulation test that has been frequently used in speech therapy clinics. All voice samples were tape-recorded and then errors were transcribed by repeated listening to the samples. Data were statistically analyzed via SPSS software.Results: The prevalence of compensatory errors (in percent) in the studied population are as follows: glottal stop: 58.1%; pharyngeal stop: 48.4%; pharyngeal fricative: 61.3%; pharyngeal affricative: 38.7%; posterior nasal fricative: 22.6%; and mid-dorsum palatal stop: 74.2%.Conclusion: The prevalence of compensatory misarticulations, as obtained in this study, was somehow different from that of the other studies. This may be due to the difference in number of samples, age groups and the different methods of categorizing articulatory errors in those researches.Keywords: Cleft palate, Compensatory misarticulation, Articulation disorder