An Acoustic Study of the Emphatic Occlusive [ṭ] in School-Going Children with Cleft Palate or Cleft Lip

The aim of this acoustic study is to analyse the phoneme [ṭ] produced by school children surgically operated on for the cleft palate or cleft lip, in order to examine their vocal characteristics, to provide speech therapists with numerous concrete analyses of voice and speech, to effectively support them and to prevent some serious outcomes on their psychological and academic development. The motivation for this study was mainly stemming from the difficulties that Algerian schoolchildren with clefts encounter in the pronunciation of this phoneme. To carry out the study, several acoustic parameters were investigated in terms of the fundamental frequency F0, the first three formants F1, F2, and F3, the energy E0, the Voice Onset Time (VOT), the durations [CV] and [V] of the subsequent vowel [a]. For the analysis, further important parameters in the field of pathological speech were deployed, namely the degree of disturbance of F0 (jitter), the degree of disturbance of intensity (shimmer) and the HNR (Harmonics to Noise Ratio). Results revealed disturbance in the values of F1, F2, and F3 and stability in the values of F0. Another important reported aspect is the increase in the value of the VOT due to the difficulties in controlling the plosives’ successive closure and release

Sound recordings of Speakers with Cleft and Lip Palate

   Our corpus consists of six words containing the emphatic phoneme [ṭ] at the beginning of the word, followed by the short vowel [a] and the long vowel [ā] : [ṭabība] (طبيبة)      ; [ṭarīq] (طريق)      ; [ṭamāṭim]( طماطم)      ; [ṭāwila] (طاولة)      ; [ṭā’ira] (طائرة)      ; [ṭāwūs] (طاووس)      . Each word of our corpus is repeated at least three times by each speaker during the recording. twenty eight (28) Pathological speakers with different facial clefts and thirty eight (38) Control speakers participated in the recordings. Pathological speakers Ps were selected by speech therapists on the basis of their progress in rehabilitation. These Ps are divided according to the type of facial cleft into two groups: Seventeen (17) Speakers undergoing speech therapy and eleven (11) having completed their speech therapy. Recall that the classification of clefts that we have kept is that of V. Veau (Fezari et al., 2014). We studied three types of cleft palate: Clefts of the soft and hard palate, up to the      incisive foramen (09 Ps); Clefts of the soft and hard palate extending      unilaterally through alveolus (03 Ps); Clefts of the soft and hard palate extending      bilaterally through alveolus (16 Ps) The recordings of the control speakers were performed under two conditions : Pupils aged between 5 to 11, from "the 1st November, 1954" school in Hammamet -Algiers, were recorded in a small silent room, with an authorization from the administration of the establishment and the parents of the children. Other speakers of different ages, accompanied by their parents, were recorded in a silent room within the university of Algiers 2, while respecting the same recording conditions. For a good quality recording, that is to say faithful and with little parasitic noise, we used the TASCAM DR-05 which is a portable recorder which allows to record audio sequences in (.wav) format of 16 bits with a sampling frequency of 44100 KHz. We manually segmented the recorded sound files using the Praat analysis tool. Usage Notes Our audio sequences are recorded in 16-bit (.wave) at a sampling frequency of 44100 Khz. They are coded in eight bits: : 1 : Speech type 2 ; 3 ; 4 : Code of Speaker 5 : Code of Gender 6 ; 7 ; 8 : Code of spoken word 9 : repetition numbering Speech Type We have four types of speech, this box can have four values : 1, 2, 3 et 4 : Normal Speech (healthy) : 1 Cleft type 2 (Clefts of the soft and hard palate, up to the incisive foramen) : 2 Cleft type 3 (Clefts of the soft and hard palate extending unilaterally through alveolus) : 3 Cleft type 4 (Clefts of the soft and hard palate extending bilaterally through alveolus) : 4 Code of spoken word Our corpus is made up of six words: Coding of the words of the corpus Spoken word Code [ṭabība] : 171 ;  [ṭarīq] : 197 ; [ṭamāṭim] : 022 ; [ṭāwila] : 142 ; [ṭā’ira] : 004 ; [ṭāwūs] : 077.</p