Within the field of communication sciences and disorders, we think of communication as broadly comprised of speech and language.

Speech gener­ally refers to aspects of communication that involve motor output for production of speech sounds. Production of speech sounds requires functional input from respiratory, phonatory, and articula­tory systems (Table 4.1). Language generally refers to the process by which we both encode and pro­cess meaning within messages, and is divided into three primary components: form, content, and use. These components can be further subdivided based on five key aspects of language—specifically, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.