abstract: Children with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP+/-L) often demonstrate disordered speech. Clinicians and researchers have a goal for children with CP+/-L to demonstrate typical speech when entering kindergarten; however, this benchmark is not routinely met. There is a large body of previous research examining speech articulation skills in this clinical population; however, there are continued questions regarding the severity of articulation deficits in children with CP+/-L, especially for the age range of children entering school. This dissertation aimed to provide additional information on speech accuracy and speech error usage in children with CP+/-L between the ages of four and seven years. Additionally, it explored individual and treatment characteristics that may influence articulation skills. Finally, it examined the relationship between speech accuracy during a sentence repetition task versus during a single-word naming task. Children with CP+/-L presented with speech accuracy that differed according to manner of production. Speech accuracy for fricative phonemes was influenced by severity of hypernasality, although age and status of secondary surgery did not influence speech accuracy for fricatives. For place of articulation, children with CP+/-L demonstrated strongest accuracy of production for bilabial and velar phonemes, while alveolar and palatal phonemes were produced with lower accuracy. Children with clefting that involved the lip and alveolus demonstrated reduced speech accuracy for alveolar phonemes compared to children with clefts involving the hard and soft palate only. Participants used a variety of speech error types, with developmental/phonological errors, anterior oral cleft speech characteristics, and compensatory errors occurring most frequently across the sample. Several factors impacted the type of speech errors used, including cleft type, severity of hypernasality, and age. The results from this dissertation project support previous research findings and provide additional information regarding the severity of speech articulation deficits according to manner and place of consonant production and according to different speech error categories. This study adds information on individual and treatment characteristics that influenced speech accuracy and speech error usage. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Speech and Hearing Science 2020

(in English): The work in this diploma contains an analysis of speech accuracy and fluency of Russian speaking and English speaking students of Czech language, based on case studies. For these case studies two Russian speaking students and two English speaking students were chosen to take part. The results were compared to the results of one native Czech speaker. The accuracy and fluency analysis was carried out based on the language principles of Rod Ellis. Within the accuracy analysis, the number of error free clauses and the average number of mistakes per one hundred words were measured. Accuracy of speech is examined through concrete grammatical phenomena like the usage of reflexive particle se/si and the usage of the verb to be in the past tense. The work in this diploma also considers the ability of analysed speakers to switch between language codes and to distinguish features of formal and spoken Czech language (spoken language in informal situations). The fluency of speech is studied based on the speech rate of all analysed speakers by counting the number of syllables per one hundred words. Subsequently, the number of false starts, repetition of words or phrases, the frequency of usage of parasite words and hesitation sounds were also examined. One of the diploma hypothesis is the statement...