Speech-Language Pathology & Communication Sciences Comprehensive Review

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering HIPAA/FERPA regulations, articulation, phonology, language domains, morphology, speech acoustics, laryngeal anatomy, and clinical goal writing.

FERPA

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act; enacted in 1974 to protect the privacy of educational records.

HIPAA

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; enacted in 1996 to protect healthcare information for all living people and up to 50 years after death, and to provide patients a right of access to medical records.

Protected Health Information (PHI)

Written (paper or electronic) or spoken records about a patient's past or future care that reveal their identity and health condition.

Tier 1 HIPAA Violation

Accessing, obtaining, or sharing PHI without authorization and allowing someone else to access or disclose PHI; penalized by a $50{,}000$ dollar fine and 1 year in prison.

Tier 2 HIPAA Violation

Committing a Tier 1 HIPAA violation by using lies or deception; penalized by a $100{,}000$ dollar fine and 5 years in prison.

Tier 3 HIPAA Violation

Using or sharing PHI to make money, gain personal benefits, or cause harm; penalized by a $250{,}000$ dollar fine and 10 years in prison.

Phoneme

An individual speech sound.

Allophone

A variation in the production of a phoneme that reflects how the sound is voiced (such as aspirated versus unaspirated /t/).

Grapheme

The printed letter of a word.

Phonetics

The study of the sounds of speech.

Phonology

The study of how speech sounds are put together to form words and other linguistic units.

Articulation

The study of how the articulators make individual speech sounds.

Canonical Shape

The syllable shape of a word based on phonemes rather than printed letters (e.g., CVC).

Stops (Plosives)

Consonant sounds produced by completely blocking the airflow in the vocal tract, building up air pressure, and then releasing it with a burst of air (/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /g/, /k/, /ʔ/).

Fricatives

Consonants produced through narrow constriction that creates a noisy sound as air passes through the narrow opening (/s/, /z/, /θ/, /ð/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/).

Affricates

Consonant sounds produced by a combination of a stop and a fricative (/t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/).

Nasals

Consonants produced with complete oral closure, allowing airflow to escape through the nasal cavity (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/).

Liquids

Smooth, flowing consonant sounds where air escapes the mouth around the tongue; includes lateral (/l/) and rhotic (/ɹ/) varieties.

Glides

Speech sounds phonetically produced like a vowel but functioning structurally as a consonant, characterized by rapid, smooth movement from one position into an adjacent vowel (/w/, /j/).

Cognate Pairs

Pairs of speech sounds (phonemes) that share the exact same place and manner of articulation but differ only in voicing.

Diphthongs

Dynamic, progressive vowel sounds that change during production, formed by combining two vowel sounds within a single phoneme.

Rising Diphthongs

Diphthongs in which the tongue moves from a lower tongue position to a higher tongue position during production.

Centering Diphthongs

Rhotic (/r/-colored) vowel sounds where the tongue moves from the initial vowel position toward the center of the mouth.

Final Consonant Deletion

A phonological process characterized by leaving out the last consonant of a word, leaving the word or syllable open.

Weak Syllable Deletion

A phonological process involving the omission of an unstressed syllable from a word containing two or more syllables.

Consonant Cluster Reduction

A phonological process that simplifies a sequence of two or more consonants by omitting one of them.

Reduplication

A phonological process where a child repeats a syllable or sound (e.g., producing 'baba' for bottle).

Progressive Assimilation

An assimilation process in which the earlier influencing phoneme affects a subsequent phoneme in a word.

Regressive Assimilation

An assimilation process in which a later phoneme influences an earlier phoneme because the speaker anticipates the upcoming sound.

Stopping

A phonological process involving the replacement of a fricative or affricate with a stop consonant.

Fronting

A phonological process involving the replacement of a velar or palatal consonant with an alveolar or labial front consonant.

Backing

A phonological process in which an anterior consonant is replaced with a posterior consonant, typically a velar stop (/k/, /g/).

Coalescence

A phonological process where two separate sounds combine into a single new sound (e.g., 'spoon' produced as 'foon').

Epenthesis

A phonological process characterized by the insertion of an extra sound, most commonly a vowel or glides /w/, /j/, /ʔ/.

Gliding (Phonological Process)

A phonological process where a liquid consonant (/l/ or /r/) is replaced with a glide (/w/ or /j/).

Deaffrication

A phonological process in which an affricate is substituted with another consonant, usually a fricative.

Reduplicated Babbling

Pre-speech vocal behavior emerging at 6–7 months characterized by repeating identical consonant-vowel combinations over and over (e.g., 'da-da', 'ma-ma').

Variegated Babbling

Pre-speech vocalizations emerging between 8 and 12 months that incorporate strings of varying syllables.

Jargon

Speech-like strings of vocalizations emerging between 8 and 12 months that mirror adult conversational intonation but contain no true words.

Protowords (PCFs)

Consistent vocal sound patterns used by an infant to reliably refer to an object or event before true adult words emerge.

Stimulability

The clinical measure of whether a client can correctly produce an error speech sound when provided with auditory and visual cues.

Aphonia

The complete absence or loss of voice production.

Dysphonia

Any impairment, difficulty, or irregularity in voice production.

Bernoulli Principle

The physical principle whereby air speeding through a constricted airway creates negative subglottic pressure that sucks the vocal folds back together during phonation.

Suprasegmentals

Linguistic features that span across multiple sounds or syllables, including intonation, stress, pitch, rate, and juncture.

Coarticulation

The articulatory phenomenon in connected speech where adjacent sounds influence one another due to overlapping vocal tract movements.

Syntax

The structural rules governing how words are linearly arranged into phrases and sentences.

Semantics

The study of the meaning of words and sentences, including literal definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and word associations.

Pragmatics

The rules governing the social use of language, including conversational context, sarcasm, politeness, and speaker intent.

Prosody

The melody of language, using intonation, stress, and rhythm to convey communicative intent beyond literal text.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent word.

Bound Morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word and must attach to other morphemes (such as prefixes and suffixes).

Lexical Morphemes

Open-class content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) that convey primary meaning and evoke a clear mental picture.

Functional Morphemes

Closed-class grammatical words (prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, articles) that serve as grammatical connectors in sentences.

Inflectional Morphemes

Bound suffixes that modify an existing word to reflect grammatical categories (e.g., tense, plurality, possession) without altering its fundamental meaning or part of speech.

Derivational Morphemes

Bound morphemes (prefixes or suffixes) that construct new words by modifying the word's meaning or transforming its part of speech.

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

A diagnosis for children exhibiting language deficits that cannot be attributed to peripheral hearing loss, neuromuscular disorders, emotional disturbance, or intellectual disability.

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

A developmental measure calculated by dividing the total number of morphemes by the total number of utterances in a language sample.

Minimal Pair

A pair of words that differ by only a single phoneme in any position and have distinct meanings.

Allomorphs

Phonological variations of a specific morpheme that do not change its underlying meaning (e.g., the plural realizations /-s/, /-z/, and /-əz/).

Anaphora

A cohesive discourse device where an expression refers back to an entity previously introduced in the text or conversation.

Cataphora

A discourse referencing pattern where the pronoun or referring term appears before the referent is explicitly introduced.

Cooperative Principle

The assumption that participants in a conversation follow unspoken communicative maxims (Quality, Quantity, Relevance, Manner) to ensure successful exchange.

Maxim of Quality

A conversational maxim under the Cooperative Principle requiring speakers to provide information that is truthful and well-supported.

Maxim of Quantity

A conversational maxim under the Cooperative Principle requiring speakers to provide the appropriate amount of information—neither too much nor too little.

Maxim of Relevance

A conversational maxim under the Cooperative Principle requiring contributions to be directly pertinent to the ongoing conversation.

Maxim of Manner

A conversational maxim under the Cooperative Principle requiring statements to be clear, orderly, and unambiguous.

Boyle's Law

The physical law stating that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its pressure at a constant temperature, driving the mechanics of inhalation and exhalation.

Speech Breathing Ratio

The respiratory breath cycle during speech, composed of approximately $10\%$ inhalation and $90\%$ exhalation.

Posterior Cricoarytenoid (PCA)

The sole intrinsic laryngeal muscle responsible for abducting (opening) the vocal folds and keeping the airway patent for respiration.

Lateral Cricoarytenoid (LCA)

An intrinsic laryngeal muscle that adducts (closes) the vocal folds to facilitate phonation.

Cricothyroid (CT)

An intrinsic laryngeal tensor muscle that elongates and tightens the vocal folds, thereby elevating vocal pitch.

Thyroarytenoid / Vocalis

An intrinsic laryngeal muscle that shortens and relaxes the vocal folds, thereby lowering vocal pitch.

Myoelastic Aerodynamic Theory of Phonation

The prevailing theory of voice production postulating that vocal fold vibration results from muscular forces (myo), tissue recoil (elastic), and airflow pressure differentials (aerodynamic).

Source-Filter Theory

An acoustic framework describing speech production where vocal fold vibration acts as the sound source ($F_0$) and the vocal tract cavities act as acoustic filters creating formants.

Voice Onset Time (VOT)

The time interval between the release of a stop consonant burst and the onset of vocal fold vibration, distinguishing voiced ($<30\,\text{ms}$) from voiceless ($>30\,\text{ms}$) stops.

Vital Capacity (VC)

The maximum volume of air an individual can exhale following a maximal inhalation.

Short-Term Goal (STG)

Measurable, incremental therapy objectives addressed during sessions that build sequentially toward achieving the long-term goal.

Long-Term Goal (LTG)

The overarching clinical outcome guiding therapy, measured across broader periods to reflect major functional gains.