Normative Nasalance Scores for French-Speaking Children in Quebec: A Tale of 2 Cities

Objective: To establish normative nasalance scores for the Nasometer II for children speaking Quebec French. Design: Prospective study using a randomly selected sample of children with typical speech. Setting: Two children’s hospitals in the province of Quebec, Canada. Participants: Eighty-eight children with typical speech, language and hearing development, aged between 6;00 and 11;11 years, were enrolled at the Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine in Montreal and the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Québec-Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada. Outcome Measure: Mean nasalance scores. Results: Mean nasalance scores were obtained for oral vowels, nasal vowels, repeated syllables, oral sentences, a nasal sentence, mixed sentences as well as a short text. While there were no meaningful significant effects of sex and age on the nasalance scores, most nasalance scores obtained at the hospital site in Montreal were statistically significantly higher than in Quebec City. Mean nasalance scores, standard deviations and theoretical critical threshold values are provided and can be used for clinical assessment and research. Conclusions: Nasalance scores differences according to hospital sites may be attributable to dialectal differences, to differences between the nasalance scores obtained by the nasometers in the 2 clinics, or to a combination of the 2. In future research, diagnostic cutoff scores for different nasal resonance disorders can be developed based on these normative scores.