• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.188-192
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• 2022

Velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) is a phenomenon that can occur due to anatomical or neurological causes of the soft palate. VPI can make the patient difficult to articulate through hypernasality and nasal emission. There has been needed the customized treatment, as VPI can occur for many causes. We present the case of 21-year-old male who took palate plastic surgery 20 years ago for congenital submucosal cleft palate. As he had poor contraction of both lateral side of velopharynx, he was diagnosed with coronal type VPI. Through sphincter pharyngoplasty, he can obtain improvement of articulation accuracy. We would like to share this challenged case.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.51-53
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• 2003

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis Is an unusual pattern of distal muscular atrophy with permanent bulbar sign. Vocal fold paralysis and velopharyngeal insufficiency(VPI) due to soft palate paralysis Is occasionally associated with distal muscular atrophy. Recently we experienced a case of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis whose symptom was initially expressed with hoarseness and VPI. So we report a case with review of literature.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.1740-1748
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• 2014

This paper focuses on listening test and acoustic analysis of patients' speech with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) and normal speakers' simulation speech. In this research, a set consisting of 50-words, vowels and single syllables is determined for speech database construction. A web-based listening evaluation system is developed for a convenient/automated evaluation procedure. The analysis results show the trend of incorrect recognition for VPI speech and the one for simulation speech are similar. Such similarity is also confirmed by comparing the formant locations of vowel and spectrum of consonant sounds. These results show that the simulation method for VPI speech is effective at generating the speech signals similar to actual VPI patient's speech. It is expected that the simulation speech data can be effectively employed for our future work such as acoustic model adaptation.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.1243-1250
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• 2015

This paper presents an effective recognition method of VPI patient's speech for a VPI speech reconstruction system. Speaker adaptation technique is employed to improve VPI speech recognition. This paper proposes to use simulated speech for generating an initial model for speaker adaptation, in order to effectively utilize the small size of VPI speech for model adaptation. We obtain 83.60% in average word accuracy by applying MLLR for speaker adaptation. The proposed speaker adaptation method using simulated speech model brings 6.38% improvement in average accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed speaker adaptation method is highly effective for developing recognition system of VPI speech which is not suitable for constructing large-size speech database.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.33-38
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• 2019

This paper proposes an effective recognition method of VPI patient's speech employing DNN-HMM-based speech recognition system, and evaluates the recognition performance compared to GMM-HMM-based system. The proposed method employs speaker adaptation technique to improve VPI speech recognition. This paper proposes to use simulated VPI speech for generating a prior model for speaker adaptation and selective learning of weight matrices of DNN, in order to effectively utilize the small size of VPI speech for model adaptation. We also apply Linear Input Network (LIN) based model adaptation technique for the DNN model. The proposed speaker adaptation method brings 2.35% improvement in average accuracy compared to GMM-HMM based ASR system. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DNN-HMM-based speech recognition system is effective for VPI speech with small-sized speech data, compared to conventional GMM-HMM system.

• Archives of Plastic Surgery
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.175-177
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• 2010

Ppupose: Velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) during articulation development period can cause compensatory articulation like glottal stop, which can maintain VPI symptoms such as hypernasality and nasal emission despite of recovered velopharyngeal function. Methods: A girl visited our department with speech problems such as hypernasality, compensatory articulation patterns, and nasal air emission. She had history of postpalatoplasty fistula which was repaired after 1 year follow-up. Results: After treated with speech therapy without surgery, her hypernasal speech problem was corrected. From this, we could assume that the fistula during articulation development period induced VPI, which leads to glottal substitution and this compensatory articulation maintained VPI though the fistula was repaired. Conclusion: In this report, we could observe that palatal fistula in articulation development period can have detrimental effect on articulation, and also we could confirm that evaluation of soft palate mechanism with using speech sample without compensatory articulations prevent the patient from unnecessary operation.

• Archives of Craniofacial Surgery
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.73-76
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• 2010

Purpose: There are several surgical methods for correcting a velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) but in some cases, it is not possible to achieve complete recovery of the velopharyngeal function. This paper introduces a new therapy for treating hypernasality without further surgery using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). Methods: CPAP therapy was applied to seven VPI patients for eight weeks from April of 2007 to September of 2009. All patients underwent palatoplasty for the cleft palate and six patients underwent palatal lengthening for VPI before CPAP therapy. A speech pathologist performed an auditory perceptual evaluation to evaluate the improvement in hypernasality after 8-week CPAP therapy. Results: Six patients showed an improvement in hypernasality after CPAP therapy according to the auditory perceptual evaluation. One patient with severe hypernasality responded to the early part of therapy but the hypernasality did not improve after therapy. Conclusion: CPAP therapy might be effective in reducing the hypernasality in patients with VPI by providing resistance training to strengthen the velopharyngeal closure muscles. In particular, CPAP therapy could be more effective for patients who show mild to moderate hypernasality after surgery.