Due to the lack of speech therapists at various regions of Brazil to assist patients with cleft lip and palate, new intervention programs must be developed for these individuals. Intensive speech therapy has been cited in literature as an alternative modality. This article relates the experience of four cleft lip patients, comparing their speech performances before and after the intensive intervention. The subjects, three adults and one adolescent with compensatory articulatory disorders, were engaged in an intensive summer training program. For each patient, intervention was carried out daily for three hours, during 10 days, divided into individual and group therapy. At the beginning and at the end of that period, patients were assessed by a speech therapist who did not participate in the sessions. A sample of spontaneous speech, counting from 1 to 20 and repetition of a list of words and sentences with oral occlusive and fricative phonemes were recorded on video tape. All patients showed satisfactory development with the intensive therapy program, adapting the worked phonemes in directed speech, but still requiring follow-up therapy to automatize their production. Intensive speech therapy was shown to be an efficient and possible alternative in these cases, and could also be a strategy at the beginning of conventional speech intervention.
Speech therapy; Cleft palate; Speech; Velopharyngeal insufficiency; Adult; Adolescent
