Welcome to Westcliffe Speech & Language!
My name is Mrs. Holly Allen, and I am the speech-language pathologist at Westcliffe Elementary. This site is designed to provide information on speech and language development, activities for at-home practice, and extra resources to support speech/language development. Feel free to browse this site and use any resources, whether your child is in speech therapy or not! View my instructional materials here.
Contact Information
Email: hallen@greenville.k12.sc.us
Office Phone: 864-355-0345
What is Speech?
Speech is how we say sounds and words. Speech includes:
Articulation
How we make speech sounds using the mouth, lips, and tongue. For example, we need to be able to say the “r” sound to say "rabbit" instead of "wabbit.”
Voice
How we use our vocal folds and breath to make sounds. Our voice can be loud or soft or high- or low-pitched. We can hurt our voice by talking too much, yelling, or coughing a lot. A voice disorder occurs when voice quality, pitch, and loudness differ or are inappropriate for an individual’s age, gender, cultural background, or geographic location. A voice disorder is present when an individual expresses concern about having an abnormal voice that does not meet daily needs—even if others do not perceive it as different or deviant. Source
Fluency
Fluency refers to continuity, smoothness, rate, and effort in speech production. All speakers are disfluent at times. They may hesitate when speaking, use fillers (“like” or “uh”), or repeat a word or phrase. These are called typical disfluencies or nonfluencies. A fluency disorder is an interruption in the flow of speaking characterized by atypical rate, rhythm, and disfluencies (e.g., repetitions of sounds, syllables, words, and phrases; sound prolongations; and blocks), which may also be accompanied by excessive tension, speaking avoidance, struggle behaviors, and secondary mannerisms. Source
What is Language?
Language refers to the words we use and how we use them to share ideas and get what we want. Language includes:
What words mean. Some words have more than one meaning. For example, “star” can be a bright object in the sky or someone famous.
How to make new words. For example, we can say “friend,” “friendly,” or “unfriendly” and mean something different.
How to put words together. For example, in English we say, “Peg walked to the new store” instead of “Peg walk store new.”
What we should say at different times. For example, we might be polite and say, “Would you mind moving your foot?” But, if the person does not move, we may say, “Get off my foot!”
Speech and Language definitions taken from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, https://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/language_speech/