| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Impairment | any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function |
| Disability | a reduced ability to meet daily living needs. |
| Handicap | a social, educational, or occupational disadvantage that is related to an impairment or disability. This disadvantage is often affected by the nature of the person's impairment and by the attitudes and biases that may be present in the person's environment. |
| Communication disorder | sometimes used as a synonym for impairment, and other times as a synonym for disability. Refers to any communication structure or function that is diminished to a significant degree. |
| Communication difference | communicative abilities that differ from those of other individuals in the same environment in the absence of an impairment. |
| Person-first language | - when describing a person with a communication disorder, professionals should refer to the individual first, then the disorder that they present. E.g., it is better to say, "children with autism" than "autistic children". |
| Discrimination | in terms of hearing, it relates the clarity with which one can hear a difference between sounds, for instance, the ability to discriminate between "bed" and "dead" |
| Consonant Cluster | two or more consonants spoken together without an intervening vowel (e.g., spoon, tree, blue, string). |
| Dementia | loss of mental function due to a pathological deterioration of the brain |
| Distinctive features | a system of the component features of sounds that is used for describing the differences between phonemes of a language. |
| Distortion | a sound is termed "distorted" when the speaker does not achieve the intended articulatory target and the resulting production is not a recognizable phoneme in the child's native language. |
| Functional speech impairment | the cause of speech difficulties with speech development cannot be determined precisely |
| Intelligibility | the ability to produce speech that someone else understands. |
| Omission | an articulation error in which a child leaves out a speech sound (e.g. "tip" is produced as "ti") |
| Oral peripheral evaluation | the clinician examines the structures used to produce speech sounds and assesses adequacy of movement of those structures for speech production. |
| Phonatory disorders | abnormalities in the pitch, loudness, or quality of the voice. |
| Resonance disorders | abnormalities in the use of the nasal cavity during speaking. Individuals can be hypernasal (excessive nasality) or denasal (insufficient nasality). |
| Single word articulation test | - a test consists of pictures and words. The pictured words usually sample all of the consonants at the initial, medial, and final positions of words. Children are asked to say the name of the object when they see it. |
| Speech delay | articulation errors or phonological processes that are often seen in younger, normally developing children |
| Speech disorder | articulation errors or phonological processes rarely seen in normal developing children |
| Spontaneous speech and language | - the clinician gathers a sample of the individual's speech and language in a communication situation that is considered to be the normal way in which the individual communicates using voice, gestures, and nonvocal communication. |
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