Graduate Courses Taught:

• Advanced Articulation Disorders

• Craniofacial Speech Disorders

• Advanced Anatomy

Current Research:

• Cleft Palate Bottle Project: Children born with cleft lip and palate often have difficulty with feeding.  Since cleft babies have more difficulty sucking (i.e., creating negative oral pressure) special bottles have been developed which claim to make feeding easier for cleft children. This research project involves a series of  studies examining the characteristics of these bottles to determine how to best use them when feeding children with cleft palate.
   

• Oral Pressure Project: Some children with repaired cleft palate speak using high oral pressures on their stop and fricative consonants.  This project investigates the hypothesis that some children with borderline velopharyngeal function may be using high intra-oral pressure as a strategy to obtain improved velopharyngeal closure.  Experiments bleeding oral pressure during speech are in process.

Future Research:

• Understanding borderline velopharyngeal function

• Developing new treatments for borderline hypernasality

Email Address:

twguyette@uams.edu