Changes in Finnish Dental Consonant Articulation in Cleft Lip/Palate Children between 6 and 8 Years of Age

The aim of this study was to clarify changes in the occurrence of misarticulations of dental consonants /r/, /s/ and /l/ between 6 and 8 years of age in cleft-affected Finnish children and to compare the effects of gender and to estimate if spacing due to changing of maxillary incisors could explain changes in articulation of these sounds. The subjects were 133 (47 girls, 86 boys) Finnish-speaking non-syndromic children with isolated cleft palate (n = 34), cleft lip/alveolus (n = 49), unilateral (n = 33), and bilateral (n = 17) cleft lip and palate. The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences between genders according to changes in articulation abilities by the age of 8 years. Eighty-one percent of the subjects with misarticulations at the age of 6 years still misarticulated at 8 years of age, and 16% of the subjects without misarticulations at the age of 6 years misarticulated at the age of 8 years; /s/ and /l/ misarticulations were eliminated more often than /r/ errors. New misarticulations were diagnosed at the age of 8 years in the same way in the groups with (14%) and without (16%) misarticulations at the age of 6 years. Dental arch spacing due to changing of maxillary incisors does not seem to explain new misarticulations of /r/, /s/ and /l/ sounds estimated at the age of 8 years.