Patterns of speech sounds after surgery: investigating infants’ vocalisations following full cleft palate repair surgery

Langner, Alice 2025. Patterns of speech sounds after surgery: investigating infants’ vocalisations following full cleft palate repair surgery. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis explores prelinguistic vocalisations from twenty-eight 14-month-olds with repaired cleft palate. It examines the vocalisation characteristics that are widely recognised to support the typical progression to first words in vocal development (Oller, 2000; McCune and Vihman, 2001; Ramsdell-Hudock et al., 2019) yet overlooked in clinical populations. While phonetic inventories from therapeutic assessments are valuably commonplace in practice and literature (Lohmander, Olsson and Flynn, 2011; Lee, Bessell, and Gibbon, 2019), an understanding of how infants with a repaired cleft palate resemble the established, typical production milestones is missing. This thesis explores unresearched naturalistic, audio data from the Cleft Collective Corpus (Wren et al., 2017) by presenting detailed, phonetic evidence on what sounds infants produce in every-day settings rather than elicited settings. It implements stricter sampling criteria than literature currently offers to limit the medical impacts (e.g., cleft type, syndromic and hearing status) on speech outcomes. The research investigates twenty-eight hour-long LENA recordings to address the central research question: to what extent do the phonetic and sequential properties of syllables produced by ICPs across palatal ages post-repair resemble the typical path of vocal development? Three analyses explore vocalisation patterns, including canonicity—or speech-likeness—using mean babble level (MBL) and articulatory consistency using vocal motor schemes (VMS), as adopted by Scherer et al. (2008) and Vihman (2016) respectively. Together with measures of vocal count, phonetic inventory, and consonant-vowel sequences, the research investigates relationships between clinical timeframes and standardised production measures. Its results emphasise the significance of palatal age on vocalisation patterns at ~14 months (especially MBLs, VMS, and contrasting vowel positions); an earlier timeframe than most research acknowledges. They capture vocalisations in their sequential contexts, i.e., the phonetic/vocalic combinations and speech-likeness of productions, rather than sounds in isolation, to reduce the distance between clinical and academic research. The results highlight that the vocal measures of babble may be a rich tool for predicting and/or recognising production milestones in infants with a cleft palate after repair. Such insight could be valuable to parents and therapists for considering intervention at earlier ages than current provisions mostly target.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PE English
Funders:	Economic and Social Research Council
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 October 2025
Last Modified:	08 Oct 2025 09:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181515

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