ABSTRACT
@#Children born with cleft lip and palate (CLP) are at high risk of disorders involving early speech production, and these problems can persist into later childhood, leading to the emergence of compensatory articulation errors. These difficulties in early vocalization directly impact the subsequent development of children's speech and vocabulary. Studies have shown that providing naturalistic interventions, such as milieu teaching and focused stimulation, for children with CLP in the first three years of life have positive impacts on the speech development of children, such as the potential to increase phonemic inventories and the percentage of correct consonants. In addition to speech and language therapists who perform systematic speech therapy, parents can be trained and supervised to deliver early speech intervention. The percentage of correct consonants can be used to assess outcome measures of speech intervention when combined with other measures, such as consonant inventory and speech intelligibility. However, much recent research in the field has focused on older children. Therefore, it must be determined if intervening during the early phase of typical speech development leads to better results. Future research should use more robust methodological designs to determine whether early speech intervention exhibits a positive impact on the speech and future physical and mental development of children with CLP.