How Incomplete Velopharyngeal Closure Can Impact Consonant Production

Full transcript

Hi, I'm Nicole Kolenda, speech-language pathologist, professor, and founder of Voice for Possibility. This week in the classes that I teach at the graduate level, we've been talking a lot about velopharyngeal closure, and how, if velopharyngeal closure is incomplete, this can affect consonant production. So I want to quickly share a graphic that I've been sharing with my class. I'm hoping you can see this okay.

Where the air goes

I want to bring your attention to these two images, hypernasal versus hyponasal. In the hypernasal image, we can see that air is going through both the nasal cavity and the oral cavity. Let's come back for a second and think about when air resonates in the nasal cavity. It's just for three sounds: the "m," the "n," and the "ng." Otherwise, the air comes up from the respiratory system and stays in the oral cavity, which is what we see for all other sounds.

So nasal sounds have air coming through the nasal cavity, and all other sounds have air coming through the oral cavity. What has to happen is really good timing with the velopharyngeal port, to get that closure at just the right time.

Hypernasality and weak plosives

If we're seeing something in our clients called incomplete velopharyngeal closure, first we might see an overriding hypernasality in that child's output. This might be dating me, but when I think about what hypernasal is, I always think about the actress Fran Drescher, who talks very nasal. That's what we'll see if there's air escaping into the nasal cavity when it shouldn't be. That would be a hypernasal resonance, and we might see it if we don't have good closure here. The air should have been funneled just through the mouth, but this is open, maybe even just a little bit, so the air is coming through the nasal cavity when it shouldn't be, and we hear a hypernasal quality to that child's output.

The other thing we might hear is weak plosives. For plosives, we need a really good buildup of intraoral air. Let's think about a "b." I close my lips, I build up that air in my oral cavity, and then I expel it. If there is incomplete velopharyngeal closure, we might see labial closure for that "b" in the child in front of us, but because they're not able to close off the back, we don't get the buildup we would want in the oral cavity. The expulsion then sounds weak, and the output that follows may be mushy rather than crisp.

When it isn't clear

Sometimes this isn't clear. We're sitting in front of the client and we're not exactly sure what's going on. The resonance might come in and out. The child might get closure on some occasions and not on others, which might make you think something is going on with their resonance, and you're not quite sure what. We may see this happen in kids with CAS (childhood apraxia of speech), because this is a timing issue: you have to align the velopharyngeal closure at just the right time to get the intended output.

So again, what we talked about is how incomplete velopharyngeal closure could affect consonants. Two of the things we might see are weak consonants, especially weak plosives, because you need that buildup of air, and an overriding, overarching hypernasality in that child's output.

Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll have some more tidbits coming up during the course of the semester. I look forward to seeing you here, and if you have any questions, you can reach me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks again.