Hawaii State Department of Education
• Special Education
- Speech-Language
Pathology
- What is
communication?
Communication skills involve speech, language and hearing which are tools that we use to communicate with one another.
Speech involves the following skills
- Articulation: The way we produce speech sounds.
- Fluency: The rhythm and rate of our speech, in other words the flow of speech. Stuttering is an example of a fluency problem.
- Voice: The pitch, volume and quality of one's voice
Language involves utilizing our skills to understand and converse with others. It is the way we use words and sentences to put together a message with our voice or other alternative communication systems (such as sign language, assistive devices, communication boards, body language, etc) It also involves listening skills so that we can understand messages. Lastly, language involves using all of the above for the purpose of social interaction.
Hearing involves the way sounds reach our ears and our brain then interprets them as words.
We communicate to share our knowledge, our thoughts, our feelings and our ideas with other people.
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