Remarks on the speech of Arabic-speaking children with cleft palate: three case studies

Abstract

Speech samples were obtained from three Arabic-speaking children with cleft palate, and two questions were asked. First, are the characteristics of their speech like those reported for cleft palate speakers of other languages? This is interesting because cleft speech data for Arabic are so far unreported. Many characteristics seem similar, but implosive airstream, oral stop devoicing, and labiodental stopping also occurred. Second, do pharyngeal and glottal compensatory articulations, frequently reported for cleft speech, occur in Arabic? Since Arabic has phonemic , we might expect they do not, to avoid phonetic neutralisation of phonemic contrast. In the samples, compensatory pharyngeal and glottal articulations were produced. The resultant neutralisations, and the neutralisation from the children's uvular compensatory articulations, indicate that the children's productions were insensitive to the phonemics of the language. This is consistent with the conclusion elsewhere that the characteristics of cleft speech are universal.