WEST-E Special Education Practice Test 2025 – All-In-One Guide to Exam Success

The term "speech disorders" refers specifically to a range of difficulties that affect an individual’s ability to produce speech sounds, utilize appropriate speech patterns, and articulate words clearly. This encompasses various issues including articulation disorders, fluency disorders (such as stuttering), and voice disorders, which can affect the quality, pitch, or volume of speech.

In contrast, language delays primarily focus on the comprehension and use of language, including vocabulary acquisition and sentence structure. Communication differences recognize the normal variations in language use across different cultures or linguistic backgrounds, rather than problems in speech production. Verbal disorders more broadly describe language impairments but are not as specifically defined as speech disorders. Thus, identifying these challenges as speech disorders highlights the specific nature of the problems related to oral language production.