A PHONETIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE CROSS-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CLEFT-PALATE SPEECH

The Eurocleft Speech Group was formed in 1989. The group is made up of eight speech and language therapists/logopedists from the six centres involved in the Eurocleft Orthodontic study, (Amsterdam/Rotterdam, Co penhagen, London, Manchester, Oslo, Stockholm) a clinical phonetician/ speech and language therapist, (advisor on statistical analytical tech niques) and a professor of clinical linguistics (director of the group ). This six-centre international study of cleft palate speech presente d major methodological problems, which appeared to be unprecedented in this area of speech pathology research. A research protocol had to be devised that would provide comparable information about the speech of children from five different language backgrounds. This paper describ es the analytical framework developed for this purpose. This framework takes account of the common phonetic characteristics of the five targ et languages and the possible effects of the cleft palate condition on the realization of these phonetic targets. The framework is cross-lin guistic in that it can be reliably applied to cleft palate speech irre spective of the language being analysed and of the analysts' language background.