Longitudinal comparison of early speech and language milestones in children with cleft palate: a comparison of US and Slovak children.

The purpose of this study was to compare early speech and language development of children with and without cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) in the US and Slovakia from 6 to 24 months of age. Thirty-two children from the US (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) and Slovakia (eight with CLP and eight noncleft) participated in this study. The children were videotaped at four time points for 30 minutes during mother-child interaction with play sets controlled for early-developing sounds in each language.

Fifty years of the Cleft Centre in Bratislava.

In our paper, we would like to present and analyse the activities in the Cleft Centre in Bratislava between 1952 and 2001. We document the gradual development of the complex treatment and the important changes in the usage of the operative techniques and in the primary and secondary operations timing, as well as the application of the new trends in the field of plastic surgery, maxillofacial surgery, anaesthesiology, orthodontics, speech therapy, paediatrics, human genetics and psychology.