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    Voice can be described as one's pitch, loudness,respiration, quality, and resonance. If you have concerns about your child's voice, a trip to the physician would be a good first step. Visit www.entnet.org/HealthInformation/Tips-for-Healthy-Voices.cfm  for vocal hygiene information.
     
                  
    Fluency or stuttering is when one demonstrates non fluent speech behavior characterized by prolongations of sounds, repetitions of sounds/words/phrases, and blocks (when you can't "get it out"). Visit www.stutteringhelp.org  for more information.
     
                       
    Articulation/Phonology is how sounds are put together to form words. Difficulties in this area can include:
     
    • Substitutions-Putting one sound in place of another. For example, "tar"  for "car"which would be substituting /t/ for /k/.
     
    • Omissions-Not including a sound in a word. For example, omitting  /s/ or  omitting final consonants in words.
                                        
     
    • Additions- Adding a sound where it should not be.
     
    • Distortions- Imprecise/indefinite production of a sound.  Hypernasality is an example of this.

                                         

     Language is our tool to communicate with others. It has five main components: semantics (word meanings), pragmatics (function or rules of conversation), syntax (sentence structure), morphology (word beginnings and endings), and phonology (sound units). Language is ever important as it impacts our interactions with others, our reading comprehension, writing, and phonological awareness.