Speech and language development is the process that individuals learn to comprehend and communicate age-appropriate nonverbal and verbal messages. The speech and language development process consists of 5 components.
Articulation/phonology is the ability of individuals to produce phonemic sounds at appropriate developmental ages.
Voice is the ability of individuals to use normal nasality, quality, pitch, and breathing to adequately communicate verbal messages to others.
Receptive and expressive language is the ability of individuals to understand and use age-appropriate words to identify/name commonly used nouns and actions, functions, and categories. It also deals with the ability of individuals to ask, understand and answer simple/complex questions, and to understand and use complete simple/complex sentence structures.
Pragmatic language is the ability of individuals to understand and use appropriate communications and interaction skills with others in various social situations.
Fluency is the ability of individuals to use a continual rate of smooth speech production in words, sentences, and conversation.