If a child finds it difficult to blow, pinching the nose can help regulate airflow. The child should then practice speech sounds without pinching the nose.

These exercises only work as treatments if hypernasality is small. Severe deviations should be treated surgically.

In cases of muscle weakness or cleft palate, special exercises can help to strengthen the soft palate muscles with the ultimate aim of decreasing airflow through the nose and thereby increasing intelligibility. Intelligibility requires the ability to close the nasal cavity, as all English sounds, except "m", "n", and "ng", have airflow only through the mouth. Normally, by age three, a child can raise the muscles of the soft palate to close to nasal cavity.

Without the use of a technological aid, nasal emission is sometimes judged by listening for any turbulence that may be produced by the nasal airflow, as when there is a small velopharyngeal opening and there is some degree of mucous in the opening. More directly, methods recommended include looking for the fogging of a mirror held near the nares or listening through a tube, the other end of which is held in or near a nares opening.

There have been many attempts to use technological augmentation more than a mirror or tube to aid the speech pathologist or provide meaningful feedback to the person attempting to correct their hypernasality. Among the more successful of these attempts, the incompleteness of velopharyngeal closure during vowels and sonorants that causes nasal resonance can be estimated and displayed for evaluation or biofeedback in speech training through the nasalance of the voice, with nasalance defined as a ratio of acoustic energy at the nostrils to that at the mouth, with some form of acoustic separation present between the mouth and nose. In the nasalance measurement system sold by WEVOSYS, the acoustic separation is provided by a mask-tube system, nasalance measurement system sold by Kay-Pentax, the acoustic separation is provided by a solid flat partition held against the upper lip, while in the system sold by Glottal Enterprises the acoustic separation can be by either a solid flat partition or a two-chamber mask.

However, devices for measuring nasalance do not measure nasal emission during pressure consonants. Because of this, a means for measuring the degree of velopharyngeal closure in consonants is also needed. A commercially available device for making such measurements is the Perci-Sar system from Microtronics. The Nasality Visualization System from Glottal Enterprises allows both the measurement of Nasal Emission and Nasalance. In the presence of a cleft palate, either of these systems can be helpful in evaluating the need for an appliance or surgical intervention to close the cleft or the success of an appliance or a surgical attempt to close the cleft.

In psychiatry, stilted speech or pedantic speech is communication characterized by situationally inappropriate formality. This formality can be expressed both through abnormal prosody as well as speech content that is "inappropriately pompous, legalistic, philosophical, or quaint". Often, such speech can act as evidence for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or a thought disorder, a common symptom in schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder.

To diagnose stilted speech, researchers have previously looked for the following characteristics:

- speech conveying more information than necessary

- vocabulary and grammar expected from formal writing rather than conversational speech

- unneeded repetition or corrections

While literal and long-winded word content is often the most identifiable feature of stilted speech, such speech often displays irregular prosody, especially in resonance. Often, the loudness, pitch, rate, and nasality of pedantic speech vary from normal speech, resulting in the perception of pedantic or stilted speaking. For example, overly loud or high-pitched speech can come across to listeners as overly forceful while slow or nasal speech creates an impression of condescension.

These attributions, which are commonly found in patients with ASD, partially account for why stilted speech has been considered a diagnostic criteria for the disorder. Stilted speech, along with atypical intonation, semantic drift, terseness, and perseveration, are all qualities known to be commonly impaired during conversation with adolescents on the autistic spectrum. Often, stilted speech found in children with ASD will also be especially stereotypic or rehearsed.

Patients with schizophrenia are also known to experience stilted speech. This symptom is attributed to both an inability to access more commonly used words and a difficulty understanding pragmatics, or the relationship between language and context. However, stilted speech appears as less common symptom compared to a certain number of other symptoms of the psychosis (Adler "et al" 1999). This element of cognitive disorder is also exhibited as a symptom in the narcissistic personality disorder (Akhtar & Thomson 1982).

In its more common usage, "stilted speech" is a term used to describe overly-formal, unnatural-sounding speech.