[Speech therapy for children with cleft lips and palates. I. Basic linguistic considerations].

According to several basic principals of hermeneutic theory (theory of understanding natural languages) we describe the major fields of language acquisition in which anomalies of CPL children often can be found. Besides phonation and articulation there are morphological, psychomotoric, onomatopoetic, and isotopic disorders. Also a delay of understanding by listening is often observed. Additionally some cofactors in psychodynamics of the family have to be respected. Defense mechanisms, somatization, and social symptomatization are described. Some examples from statistics and experimental psycholinguistics show, that a diagnosis of early language acquisition can't be found by comparing means (naive model of diagnosis). We show how to find out the multiple covariance of early language acquisition tests with the control groups. A final case study shows a typical process of CLP children's language acquisition.