Measuring Phonological Precision in Children with Cleft Lip and Palate

Children with Cleft Lip and Palate (CLP) may experience difficulties in oral communication, leading to other developmental problems such as delayed language acquisition and poor social skills; thus, early treatment is essential for successful speech rehabilitation. In this paper, we propose a methodology for automatically assessing the phonological precision of children with CLP. We propose to use the probabilities obtained from a phonological class recognizer to measure phonological precision during connected speech. Furthermore, we compute the nasal-to-sound ratio to improve the automatic detection of the nasality level. For this, we considered speech recordings of 88 children with CLP, assessed by a clinician according to four nasality levels: normal, mild, moderate, and severe. We obtained an F1-score of up to 0.54 for detecting the nasality level automatically. The results suggest that phonological analysis can be used for individualized speech rehabilitation.