Important Speech and Language Terms to Know

What are Speech and Language Development Terms?

1. Speech Intelligibility: How well other people can understand what a child is saying. 
2. Speech Articulation: How clearly a child can say different sounds and words.
3.  Oral Mechanism: Refers to the development and function of parts inside the mouth, like teeth coming in. 
4. Acquired Sounds: A child can say specific speech sounds at a certain age. 
5. Phonetic Inventory: The collection of sounds a child can produce when they speak. 
6. Phonological Processes: Common ways young children simplify speech, like leaving off the ends of words or mixing up sounds. 
7. Prosody: The rhythm and melody of speech, like how our voice goes up and down when we talk. 
8. Metalinguistic Skills: A child’s ability to think about and notice their speech, like correcting themselves when they make a mistake. 
9. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU): The average number of words a child uses in their sentences. 
10. Morphology: How a child starts to use word endings, like adding “-ing” to “run” to make “running.” 
11. Protowords: Made-up words that a child uses consistently to mean something specific. 
12. Brown’s Stage 1 is an early stage of language development in which children use one-word sentences to express simple ideas. 
13. Fronting of Velars: When a child changes a sound made in the back of the mouth, like “g,” to a sound made in the front, like “d.” 
14. Cluster Reduction: When a child simplifies a group of consonants, like saying “poon” instead of “spoon.” 
15. Context-sensitive Voicing: Changing sounds based on where they are in a word, like saying “pig” as “big.” 
16. Reduplication: When a child repeats a syllable, like saying “baba” for “bottle.”
17. Consonant Harmony occurs when a child makes all the consonants in a word sound similar, like saying “gog” for “dog.” 
18. Present Progressive “-ing” Form: When a child starts using words with “-ing,” like “running” or “jumping.”
19. Rising and Falling Contours in Speech: How a child’s voice goes up and down when they talk helps show emotion or ask questions. 
20. Expressive and Receptive Language: Expressive language is how a child uses words to express themselves; receptive language is how well they understand what others say. in this context 

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