The Immediate Effect of Straw Phonation in Children With Repaired Cleft Palate.

Objective: This study aims to investigate the immediate effect of straw phonation on the phonation of Persian-speaking children with repaired cleft palate.
Study Design: Quasi-experimental preintervention and postintervention.
Methods: Seventeen children with repaired cleft palate and velopharyngeal dysfunction were investigated. A control group was established comprising children without a cleft palate (control group), carefully matched in terms of age and gender. All participants underwent straw phonation and assessment. The assessments were made two times: at baseline and immediately after straw phonation. Each participant performs straw phonation (a short straw measuring 3 mm in inner diameter and 20 cm in length) once for 3 minutes. The acoustic analysis including parameters, such as jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), cepstral peak prominence (CPP) parameters, as well as the electroglottography (closed quotient [CQ]) analysis were performed at pretreatment and immediately after treatment.
Results: Compared with the pretreatment values, after-treatment observation demonstrated a significant reduction in Jitter % and Shimmer %, and a significant enhancement in HNR and CPP among children with repaired cleft palate. There is no significant difference in intragroup data in the CPP and CQ in pretreatment.
Conclusions: The proposed straw phonation technique results in an immediate positive change in the quality of voice in both groups. Moreover, assessments in the clinical group showed a significant decrease in shimmer and jitter perturbation, alongside elevated levels of HNR and CPP subsequent to straw phonation, irrespective of the phonatory task.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)