Ingomar Elementary School

Speech and Language Terms and Definitions:

ARTICULATION- This refers to the pronunciation of speech sounds. Disorders of articulation include sound substitutions, omissions, and distortions.

LANGUAGE DISORDERS: Under the heading Language Disorders, there are several subcategories.

SEMANTICS- This refers to a child's vocabulary skills. It is evaluated by looking at how well a child comprehends and use vocabulary skills.

MORPHOLOGY- this refers to a child's comprehension and use of grammatical skills. These skills may include: plurals, pronouns, verb tense, negation (e.g. doesn't, not) and questions.

SYNTAX- This term refers to sentence forms. For example, simple sentences (The cat ran.) to more complex statements (The cat ran quickly down the street.) Incorrect word order and/or simplicity of sentences length usually characterize syntactic disorders.

LANGUAGE PROCESSING SKILLS-This area relates to how well a child listens to a spoken message and his/her ability to act upon it. Skills may be worked upon are improving a child's ability to follow simple to complex directions, story sequencing/retelling, and also auditory discrimination of speech sounds to improve phonics/reading skills.

PRAGMATICS- pragmatics is the social aspects of language. It refers to how well a person attends to the speaker, the ability to stay on topic of conversation and maintain the topic, appropriate eye contact and body posture, and the ability to take turns.

PHONOLOGY-This area of language refers to the rules of how sounds go together to form words. For example, we learn that in English some words have endings while others do not (such as go versus got).

VOICE- A clinician evaluates the child's vocal volume (too loud, too soft) , quality (harsh, hoarse), pitch level (too high or low).

FLUENCY- Disorders of fluency refer to the presence of word prolongations/repetitions and the degree of severity in which they are exhibited. This disorder is commonly known as stuttering.