CCC-SLP key terms

A decision-making approach that combines the best available research evidence, the clinician's expertise, and the client's values, preferences, and circumstances when choosing assessment or treatment procedures.

The professional code binding certified speech-language pathologists, organized around core principles such as responsibility to clients, competence, and integrity, with enforceable rules governing clinical and professional conduct.

The range of professional activities a clinician is legally and ethically permitted to perform, defined by state licensure law and professional documents; services outside it require referral or supervision.

Obtaining a client's or surrogate's voluntary agreement to evaluation or treatment after explaining purpose, procedures, risks, benefits, alternatives, and the right to withdraw at any time.

The legal and ethical duty to protect client records and communications; HIPAA governs health information in most settings, while FERPA protects education records and requires consent for most disclosures.

The legal obligation of clinicians to report suspected child abuse, neglect, or abuse of vulnerable adults to designated authorities, even when the information was learned during confidential clinical services.

A systematically developed statement that helps clinicians and clients make decisions about appropriate care for specific clinical circumstances; it informs but does not replace individualized clinical judgment.

The degree to which an intervention is delivered as designed and intended, including adherence to procedures, dosage, and quality of delivery; low fidelity weakens conclusions about treatment effectiveness.

The oversight a qualified clinician provides to students, clinical fellows, assistants, or less experienced staff, including observation, feedback, and shared accountability for client care and documentation.

The supervised post-master's period of professional practice required for ASHA certification, during which a fellow completes mentored clinical work and is evaluated by an ASHA-certified supervisor.

An assessment with fixed administration and scoring procedures and normative data, allowing a client's performance to be compared with a representative reference group using standard scores and percentiles.

Measurement in which a client's score is interpreted relative to the distribution of scores from a normative sample, indicating how far performance deviates from typical peers.

Measurement that compares a client's performance to a defined standard or skill criterion rather than to other people, showing what the client can and cannot do.

A transformed score expressing how far a raw score lies from the normative mean in standard deviation units; common scales use a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15.

The percentage of individuals in the normative sample who scored at or below a given raw score; a percentile of 25 means the client performed as well as or better than 25 percent of peers.

An index of the average amount of error in a test score, used to build confidence intervals around an observed score and to judge whether score differences are meaningful.

The consistency or dependability of a measurement across items, occasions, or raters; a test cannot be valid if it is unreliable, though reliability alone does not guarantee validity.

The extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure and supports the intended interpretations and decisions, including content, construct, and criterion-related evidence.

Sensitivity is the proportion of people with a disorder correctly identified by a screening or diagnostic measure; specificity is the proportion without the disorder correctly identified as unaffected.

The probability that a person who tests positive on a screening or diagnostic measure actually has the disorder, which depends on sensitivity, specificity, and the base rate in the population.

A brief, low-cost procedure used to identify individuals who may need further evaluation; screening does not diagnose and typically requires follow-up assessment for confirmation.

An interactive assessment approach that measures a learner's ability to improve with mediation, cues, or teaching, often distinguishing language difference from language disorder.

Test administration rules that determine starting and stopping points: a basal is the point below which items are credited as correct, and a ceiling is the point at which testing stops.

A difference reflects normal variation such as dialect or second-language influence, whereas a disorder is a deficit relative to the person's own language community and is not explained by cultural or linguistic diversity.

Evaluation of a multilingual client that considers both languages, uses appropriate tools and interpreters, and distinguishes typical second-language acquisition patterns from true impairment.

Brief, repeated probes drawn from the student's actual instructional material, used to monitor academic and communication progress and to judge responsiveness to intervention over time.

A multi-tiered framework of increasingly intensive instruction and intervention, with progress data used to identify students who need special education evaluation and to document instructional need.

A legally required written plan for a student eligible for special education, specifying present levels, measurable goals, services, accommodations, and placement, developed by a team including the family.

The legal requirement that students with disabilities be educated with peers without disabilities to the maximum extent appropriate, with removal only when supports cannot meet their needs.

Systematic, repeated measurement of a client's performance during intervention to determine whether skills are improving and whether the plan should be continued, adjusted, or discontinued.

The amount of intervention delivered, described by session frequency, session length, and total duration, along with the number of teaching trials or responses within sessions.

Methods and devices that supplement or replace spoken language, ranging from picture boards and gestures to speech-generating devices, selected to match the user's communication needs and abilities.

An intervention in which a communication partner models use of an AAC system while speaking, providing repeated visual and linguistic input that supports the learner's own AAC use.

A naturalistic language intervention that arranges the environment and uses modeling, mands, and time delay to prompt communication within everyday routines and activities.

Responsive language techniques in which an adult restates a child's utterance with added grammatical detail (expansion) or reformulates it into a different, more complete sentence form (recast).

Awareness of and ability to manipulate the sound structure of spoken language, including syllables, onsets and rimes, and individual phonemes; a strong predictor of later reading skill.

The most specific level of phonological awareness: the ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemes, such as blending, segmenting, and deleting sounds in words.

A speech sound disorder characterized by patterned errors in the rule-based use of sounds, such as fronting or final consonant deletion, rather than difficulty producing individual motor movements.

A speech sound disorder involving difficulty producing specific sounds accurately due to motor or structural factors, often with consistent substitutions, distortions, or omissions of particular phonemes.

A motor speech disorder in children involving impaired planning and programming of movement sequences, producing inconsistent errors, distorted transitions, and difficulty with multisyllabic words.

The degree to which a listener can understand a speaker's intended message, influenced by speech sound accuracy, prosody, rate, and context; often reported as a percentage of words understood.

An acquired language disorder caused by brain damage, most often stroke, affecting comprehension and/or production across spoken and written modalities while cognition is relatively preserved.

Communication changes after right-hemisphere damage, including difficulty with inference, humor, topic maintenance, and prosody, often with left-side neglect and reduced awareness of deficits.

A neurodegenerative language disorder that begins with progressive language decline, with variants affecting grammar and fluency, word meaning, or single-word retrieval while other cognitive domains are initially spared.

Impaired communication resulting from disruption of attention, memory, executive function, or social cognition, commonly seen after traumatic brain injury or in dementia.

A progressive syndrome of cognitive decline affecting memory, reasoning, and communication sufficient to interfere with daily function; language changes appear in many types.

A fluency disorder marked by repetitions, prolongations, and blocks that disrupt forward speech flow, often accompanied by physical tension, avoidance, and negative reactions to speaking.

A fluency disorder characterized by rapid or irregular speech rate, excessive disfluencies, and collapsed or unclear articulation, often with limited awareness of the problem.

A treatment approach that teaches a new, controlled speaking pattern using slowed rate, gentle onsets, light contacts, and continuous voicing, then gradually transfers it to natural conversation.

A pattern in nonfluent aphasia in which speech omits function words and grammatical endings, producing short, telegraphic utterances with simplified sentence structure.

A group of motor speech disorders caused by damage to the central or peripheral nervous system, producing weak, slow, or uncoordinated speech with impaired articulation, resonance, or prosody.

A motor speech disorder of planning and programming movements for speech, characterized by inconsistent sound errors, groping, and effortful transitions, not attributable to muscle weakness.

Difficulty with swallowing in any phase-oral preparatory, oral, pharyngeal, or esophageal-that may cause aspiration, malnutrition, dehydration, or reduced quality of life.

Entry of food, liquid, or secretions below the level of the true vocal folds into the airway, which may be silent and can lead to pneumonia or other respiratory complications.

Entry of material into the laryngeal vestibule that does not pass below the true vocal folds; it may be cleared spontaneously or progress to aspiration.

A dynamic imaging procedure using fluoroscopy and barium-coated materials to observe all swallow phases in real time and to test the effect of compensatory strategies.

A bedside procedure using a flexible endoscope to view the pharynx and larynx before and after swallows, assessing residue, penetration, aspiration, and sensation without radiation.

A framework of texture-modified foods and thickened liquids, from thin to spoon-thick and from regular to pureed, used to match food consistency to a client's swallowing ability.