Cleft lip and/or palate is a craniofacial condition that can lead to complex speech disorders. In particular, the auditory-perceptual speech assessments of individuals with cleft palate can be difficult because cleft-type compensatory articulations may be outside of English phonology. Therefore, it is desirable to supplement auditory-perceptual assessments with instrumental measurements. In the first study, thirteen participants with cleft-type compensatory articulations completed ultrasound speech exams. The stimuli were repeated VCV combinations (target consonants: [t], [k], [s], [sh], [n], [ng]; vowel contexts: [a], [i], [u]). Ultrasound imaging confirmed auditory-perceptual impressions and revealed covert articulatory movements. In the second study, six participants were assessed after a course of speech therapy. Outcomes were recorded on a severity metric with categories describing auditory-perceptual and motor aspects of speech errors. The severity metric quantified the incremental changes in both dimensions. Based on the research presented, further investigations of cleft palate speech using ultrasound are warranted.

Thesis--University of Oregon. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation contributes to a fuller description of the French c'est-cleft by reporting on three empirical studies on its meaning and use, and presenting a unified account of the cleft couched in Stochastic Optimality Theory. The first two studies in this dissertation explore the meaning of the cleft, more specifically the exhaustive meaning. First, the results from a forced-choice task, designed to test the level of exhaustivity of the cleft compared to exclusive sentences and canonical sentences, show that the cleft does not behave like the other two sentence forms. This is taken to indicate that the exhaustivity associated with the cleft is not truth-conditional. Instead, I argue that exhaustivity arises from a pragmatic constraint on the way speakers use language. This argument is supported further in the second study, a corpus study that shows there is no categorical ban on the type of NP that can occur in post-copular position in a cleft. In fact, the cleft interacts felicitously with a number of expressions such as universal quantifiers and additives, which have been claimed to never appear in post-copular position. This corpus study further shows that the primary aspect of the cleft is not to convey exhaustivity, but instead to convey contrast or correction. Finally, the third study, a semi-spontaneous production experiment, helps make precise the situations in which an element is clefted. The results demonstrate that there is a clear asymmetry between the way grammatical subjects or non-subjects are marked: focused subjects are mostly clefted whereas focused non-subjects generally remain in situ. Moreover, the experiment shows that there exists some amount of free variation: subjects can be realized via prosody and non-subjects can be clefted. I conclude my research by proposing that the non-random alternation cleft/canonical is not a categorical phenomenon, but is gradient and explained by a set of constraints on French' syntax, prosody and pragmatics. The cleft is used to provide contrast or a total answer to the question under discussion. / text

published_or_final_version / Dental Surgery / Master / Master of Dental Surgery

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The application of precisely timed, short exposures of embryos to specific metabolic inbibitors is a useful method for analysing the biochemical aspects of development. The teratologic approach to the study of the biochemical requirerments of various organogenetic processes in the developing embryo was first formulated by Warkany (1944) who showed that the offspring of female rats maintained on a vitamin A deficient diet had characteristic patterns of malformations. [...]

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Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Univ., 2001. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.