The Cleft Care UK study. Part 4: perceptual speech outcomes

To describe the perceptual speech outcomes from the Cleft Care UK (CCUK) study and compare them to the 1998 Clinical Standards Advisory Group (CSAG) audit.

A cross-sectional study of 248 children born with complete unilateral cleft lip and palate, between 1 April 2005 and 31 March 2007 who underwent speech assessment.

Centre-based specialist speech and language therapists (SLT) took speech audio-video recordings according to nationally agreed guidelines. Two independent listeners undertook the perceptual analysis using the CAPS-A Audit tool. Intra- and inter-rater reliability were tested.

For each speech parameter of intelligibility/distinctiveness, hypernasality, palatal/palatalization, backed to velar/uvular, glottal, weak and nasalized consonants, and nasal realizations, there was strong evidence that speech outcomes were better in the CCUK children compared to CSAG children. The parameters which did not show improvement were nasal emission, nasal turbulence, hyponasality and lateral/lateralization.

These results suggest that centralization of cleft care into high volume centres has resulted in improvements in UK speech outcomes in five-year-olds with unilateral cleft lip and palate. This may be associated with the development of a specialized workforce. Nevertheless, there still remains a group of children with significant difficulties at school entry.