Speech and Language Impairment: What Does This Mean?

According to the IDEIA, "Speech or language impairment means a communication disorder, such as stuttering, impaired articulation, a language impairment, or a voice impairment, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance.” Speech or language impairment is a broad topic with many smaller parts to it- it is broken up into these four topics:
1. Articulation Disorder: the difficulty of making certain sounds
2. Fluency: the flow of speech- typically a stutter.
3. Voice: involves pitch, noise level, quality of voice
4. Language: impaired ability to understand/use words in context.