Influence of speech sample on the perceptual judgment of hypernasality

Abstract

The diagnosis of the speech symptoms caused by velopharyngeal dysfunction is done by means of perceptual assessment. This method is considered the gold standard for the assessment of speech disorders related to cleft palate and velopharyngeal dysfunction. However, due to the subjective nature of perceptual assessment, it is difficult to obtain a high level of agreement regarding the severity of speech symptoms, especially hypernasality. The general consensus states that the agreement between different raters on the perceptual judgment of hypernasality may be influenced by several factors, such as the speech sample analyzed. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of the type of speech sample on the inter- and intra-rater reliability in the perceptual judgment of hypernasality. A minimum of 112 recorded speech samples will be selected from patients with repaired cleft palate: 58 spontaneous speech samples and 54 samples containing sentences with plosives and fricatives. All samples will be analyzed by three experienced speech therapists in order to classify the hypernasality on a 4-point scale (1=absent; 2=mild; 3=moderate and 4=severe) in both the sentence and spontaneous speech samples. The inter- and intra-rater agreements will be established for each sample, and both agreements will be compared to each other. (AU)