Objective To find an objective indexto describe the severity of hypernasality in cleft palate patients through speech spectroanalysis.Methods 60 audio records of cleft palate patients were analyzed by spectroanalysis, the relative energy in low frequency area (REL) was calculated in the LPC spectrogram. One experienced speech therapist and two nonprofessionals made perceptual judgments of the same records. Spearman correlation analysiswas conducted to test if the 3 groups of data have signifi- cant correlations.Results RELhad significant correlation with professional judgments (correlation coefficient was 0·272,P
