Acoustic Analysis of the Differences of Fricatives and Affricates between Normal Children and Cleft Palate Children

The frequency in which noise energy is generated, that is, the point where the preceding vowel ends is the cut-off frequency. Thereupon, this study intends to examine the correlations between, cut-off frequencies, cut-off frequencies changed by the following vowel, and cut-off frequencies and nasalance score, of fricatives and affricates with the subjects of children with the cleft palate and normal children. The subjects of this study are total 12 children residing in Seoul and Gyeonggi area. Six are the children diagnosed to have the cleft palate and whose chronological age are more than six, and another six are the normal children who are also more than six and whose chronological age and sex correspond to those of the former. Each subject was presented with nonsyllable environment and sentence environment(50 environment) of fricatives and affricates. Regarding meaningless syllable environment and sentence environment of fricatives and affricates, children with the cleft palate had lower cut-off frequencies than normal children. As a result of comparative study on correlations between cut-off frequencies and nasalance score of children with the cleft palate and normal children, it doesn`t show statistically significant correlations in both meaningless syllable environment and sentence environment of normal children, but it has statistically significant correlations in sentence environment of children with the cleft palate.