ABSTRACT
What do we mean by early intervention, and is it effective in preventing or changing
cleft-type characteristics? If by ‘early’ we mean under two years of age, then the jury
is still out on whether intervention improves speech outcome by, say, the age of four.
To date there have been no large-scale studies proving that active intervention in the
very early period is helpful; therefore some may argue that it is not justified on the
