Listening preference and discrimination for cries of non-cleft palate children, repaired cleft palate children, and non-repaired cleft palate children

Tasks were conducted to test whether there are differences in listener preference and/or discrimination between cries from the following groups: non-cleft palate children, unrepaired cleft palate children, and repaired cleft palate children. As a group, the cries of young cleft palate children treated by the early prosthetic-surgical approach are indistinguishable from those of young children with normal palates and unrepaired clefts insofar as listener choice for the cries are concerned. Acoustic features of the recorded cries of infants have to be considered, e.g., such differences might be sustained vs. interrupted crying, balanced loudness vs. imbalanced loudness, and possible distortions introduced by control of saliva. There is no standard acoustic reference for "cleft palate crying" as compared with "non-cleft palate crying," particularly since there is no demonstrable evidence that the cries of cleft palate infants are different from normal palate infants. Twenty-six narrow band sections (amplitude vs. frequency) of each cry sample were recorded using the Kay-Elemetric Sonograph (Model 6061 A). Overlapping all the sections for a given group and then plotting the average curve (by inspection) yielded similar spectrum curves for all three groups.