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This dissertation, Placement Errors in Speakers With Cleft Palate: Perceptual, Electropalatography and Acoustic Evidence by Chun, Chun, 秦蓁, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Placement errors in speakers with cleft palate: perceptual, electropalatography and acoustic evidence submitted by Chun Chun for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in September 2006. Speakers with cleft palate are commonly found to have posterior placements for oral targets. Alveolar targets may be substituted by velar or post-velar stops or middorsum- palatal stops. However, auditory perceptual transcription may fail to reveal some of the articulatory errors produced by this group of speakers. Low inter-listener agreement has been reported in the literature for the transcription of posterior placements and other errors produced by speakers with cleft palate. The aim of this project was to investigate and explain listeners' difficulties in the judgment of place of articulation in speakers with cleft palate, using a combination of electropalatography, perceptual and acoustic analysis. Speech stimuli for this study were taken from five children with repaired cleft palate who were undergoing electropalatography therapy for 'backing'. Ninety-six tokens (all target h h /t / and /k / in VCV structure) were systematically categorized into six EPG patterns: alveolar, modified velar, velar, double alveolar-velar, full contact and no contact. Twelve speech-language pathologists who were non-experts in cleft palate speech were asked to 1 perform three perceptual tasks (auditory, visual, auditory-visual). After listening to each stimulus, listeners were asked to select a choice from alveolar, middorsum-palatal and velar. Acoustic measures of the stimuli were made and analysed. h h A wide range of EPG patterns were identified in the production of /t / and /k / produced by this group of speakers. Low intra- and inter-listener agreement were found particularly for the double alveolar-velar and full contact patterns. Some of these stimuli were judged as normal alveolar or velar stops, while some were judged as middorsum-palatal stops. Although not all of the tokens judged as middorsum-palatal stops were classic middorsum-palatal stops as previously described, they were distinctive from the alveolar and velar stops. Acoustic analysis showed significant differences in formant frequencies between the articulatory patterns which were judged as middorsum-palatal stops and those judged as alveolar and velar stops. The results of this project contribute to our understanding of listeners' difficulties in transcribing speech produced by speakers with cleft palate. The study highlights the importance of listeners being aware of the wide range of oral stops which may present in speakers with cleft palate in their productions of alveolar and velar targets. The frequent occurrence of the double alveolar-velar and full contact patterns assists in our understanding of listeners' difficulties perceiving placement errors in cleft palate speech. The use of at least three perceptual categories in phonetic training could help listeners to create an additional perceptual category in the judgment of place of articulation. 2 DOI: 10.5353/th_b3900948 Subjects: Cleft palate childrenArticulation disorders in children - DiagnosisSpeech perception

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