NORMATIVE NASALANCE VALUES ACROSS STIMULI AND GENDER IN MALAYALAM SPEAKING INDIVIDUALS

Nasality is the common problem in subjects with repaired / unrepaired cleft palate, which affects the speech intelligibility. Nasal resonance is not only seen in disordered speech, even normal speech also consist some amount of nasality. Example: Among the Indian languages, Malayalam has got more nasal resonance than any other languages. Nasality can be assessed by subjective as well as objective methods. Perceptual judgment of nasality is done using various rating scales. These rating scales have used different rating points ranging from five point scale to nine point scales. The judges for these rating scales were from trained speech pathologists to clients themselves. Since this is a subjective task, standard data / normative data cannot be established due to many disadvantages associated with this method. Hence, standard objective methods are essential to assess the velopharyngeal dysfunction and to provide guidelines for suitable rehabilitation method.