Normative nasalance scores for Estonian children

Normative nasalance scores are essential for the treatment and assessment purposes for clinicians. Till date, no studies have been done on nasalance in Estonia. This research was conducted to develop Estonia-specific optimized speech stimuli for Nasometer II and establish the normative nasalance scores. Ninety-two randomly selected healthy and 14 cleft palate Estonian monolingual children, aged four to seven years, were included as participants. Estonian language-specific test material was developed. The Estonian test material consisted of 24 speech stimuli. Based on the phoneme content, the stimuli were divided into three groups: (1) sentences that included oral and nasal phonemes and targeted the same phoneme distribution as in spontaneous speech, (2) sentences that included only oral phonemes and (3) sentences that were loaded with nasal phonemes. Nasometer II software was used to calculate the nasalance scores for each child and each sentence. Results indicated that there were significant differences in nasalance scores for oronasal and oral stimuli scores, and no significant differences were found in nasal stimuli scores between the study and control group. The threshold for oronasal stimuli was 42.1-18.9, oral stimuli was 27.9-3.9 and nasal stimuli was 69.4-46.2. In conclusion, Estonia-specific optimized speech stimuli were developed and normative nasalance scores were established. These normative scores can be used for the diagnosis and follow-up treatment of patients with resonance disorders, especially for patients with cleft palate.