Nasalance scores for Vietnamese-speaking children with oral clefts.

OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to obtain nasalance scores for Vietnamese-speaking patients with repaired cleft palate with or without cleft lip. METHODS: A total of 29 children with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (4-18 years old, mean age 7.9±3.5 years old) were included in this study. Speech material was designed specifically for the Vietnamese language. The speech material consisted of oral stimuli (19 oral words and 18 oral sentences), oro-nasal stimuli (eight sentences), and nasal stimuli (seven sentences). The patients repeated the stimuli after the examiner. The Nasometer II (model 6450) was used to compute nasalance scores. RESULTS: The mean nasalance scores were 27.1% for oral stimuli, 40.2% for oro-nasal stimuli, and 57.5% for nasal stimuli. Hypernasality was detected in 41.4% of the patients. CONCLUSION: Vietnamese-speaking patients with repaired cleft palate with or without cleft lip who did not undergo speech therapy had poor speech outcomes.

Normative nasalance scores for Vietnamese-speaking children.

OBJECTIVE: The Nasometer is increasingly being used to complement auditory perceptual assessment of nasality. Nasalance scores which are obtained from the Nasometer vary across languages. Normative nasalance scores have been established for many languages but not for the Vietnamese language. The objective of this study was to obtain the normative nasalance scores for Vietnamese-speaking children. PARTICIPANTS: In this study, 102 healthy Vietnamese children speaking in the central regional dialect aged from 7 to 9 years (45 boys, 57 girls; mean age = 7.5 years) at a primary school in Hue, Vietnam participated. PROCEDURES: Three speech stimuli, which were specific for the Vietnamese language, were designed: oral stimuli (19 words and 18 sentences), oro-nasal stimuli (eight sentences) and nasal stimuli (seven sentences). The children were asked to repeat these stimuli after the examiner. The Nasometer II (model 6450) was used to obtain the nasalance scores. The procedure took about 10 minutes for each child. RESULTS: The mean nasalance scores and the standard deviation of each stimulus were: 13.1 ± 5.8 (oral stimuli), 30.7 ± 6.6 (oro-nasal stimuli) and 56.9 ± 9.2 (nasal stimuli). No significant differences between the genders were found. CONCLUSIONS: The normative nasalance scores provide essential reference information for clinicians who deal with nasalance disorders, especially patients with cleft palate. The nasalance scores in this study were established for Vietnamese children speaking in the central regional dialect and can be applied to both genders.