Prevalence and types of articulation errors in Saudi Arabic-speaking children with repaired cleft lip and palate.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to assess prevalence and types of consonant production errors and phonological processes in Saudi Arabic-speaking children with repaired cleft lip and palate, and to determine the relationship between frequency of errors on one hand and the type of the cleft. Possible relationship between age, gender and frequency of errors was also investigated. METHODS: Eighty Saudi children with repaired cleft lip and palate aged 6-15 years (mean 6.7 years), underwent speech, language, and hearing evaluation. The diagnosis of articulation deficits was based on the results of an Arabic articulation test. Phonological processes were reported based on the productivity scale of a minimum 20% of occurrence. Diagnosis of nasality was based on a 5-point scale that reflects severity from 0 through 4. All participants underwent intraoral examination, informal language assessment, and hearing evaluation to assess their speech and language abilities. The Chi-Square test for independence was used to analyze the results of consonant production as a function of type of CLP and age. RESULTS: Out of 80 participants with CLP, 21 participants had normal articulation and resonance, 59 of participants (74%) showed speech abnormalities. Twenty-one of these 59 participants showed only articulation errors; 17 showed only hypernasality; and 21 showed both articulation and resonance deficits. CAs were observed in 20 participant. The productive phonological processes were consonant backing, final consonant deletion, gliding, and stopping. At age 6 and older, 37% of participants had persisting hearing loss. CONCLUSIONS: Despite early age at time of surgery (mean 6.7 months) for the studied CLP participants in this study, a substantial number of them demonstrated articulation errors and hypernasality. The results showed desirable findings for diverse languages. It is especially interesting to consider the prevalence of glottal stops and pharyngeal fricatives in a population for whom these sound are phonemic.

Agrammatism in Jordanian-Arabic speakers.

The studies of agrammatism show that not all morpho-syntactic elements are impaired to the same degree and that some of this variation may be due to language-specific differences. This study investigated the production of morpho-syntactic elements in 15 Jordanian-Arabic (JA) speaking individuals with agrammatism and 15 age-matched neurologically healthy individuals. Two experiments were conducted to examine the production of complementizer, tense, agreement and negation morphology in JA. The results indicated that the speakers of JA with agrammatism had marked dissociations in producing specific morpho-syntactic elements. The observed impairment patterns overlapped, in many respects, with those observed in other linguistic groups. The findings are discussed with respect to current theories of agrammatism, including both morpho-syntactic and computational accounts.