All articles A–Z

Speculative execution

Speculative execution is a processor technique that computes instructions before it is certain they are needed, discarding wrong guesses; the same mechanism enables Spectre security attacks.

Speculative fiction is the umbrella term for non-mimetic fiction: fantasy, science fiction, horror, dystopia, alternate history, and hybrids. Coined by Robert Heinlein in 1941 as a stricter science-fiction subset, it now covers all genres departing from consensus reality.

Speculoos

Speculoos: Belgian caramelized biscuit, distinct from spiced Dutch speculaas; made famous by Lotus Bakeries (founded 1932, Lembeke) as Biscoff, also sold as cookie butter spread, now a top-5 global cookie brand.

Oct 22, 2026

Speculum

Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies is an English-language quarterly published by the University of Chicago Press for the Medieval Academy of America, founded in 1926.

Speculum examination

A speculum examination is a physical exam in which a speculum holds open a body canal, most often the vagina, so a clinician can view the cervix and collect specimens.

Speech

Speech: the vocal production of language via coordinated respiration, phonation, articulation, resonance, and prosody; covers phonetics, speech disorders (dysarthria, speech sound disorders), and speech evolution.

Speech act

Speech act theory, founded in J. L. Austin's 1955 Harvard lectures (How to Do Things with Words, 1962) and systematized by John Searle, holds that utterances perform acts such as promising, ordering, and declaring, analyzed via locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts and felicity conditions.

Speech activity detection

Speech activity detection (SAD), also called voice activity detection (VAD), is a signal processing method that separates speech from silence and noise in audio, frame by frame.

Oct 20, 2026

Speech Articulation Tests

Speech articulation tests are standardized single-word instruments, such as the Goldman-Fristoe and Arizona scales, that measure accuracy of speech sound production in children, supplemented by connected speech sampling, screening tools, and stimulability testing.

Speech audiometry

Speech audiometry is a clinical hearing test measuring how well a listener detects and understands speech rather than pure tones, using the speech recognition threshold and word recognition score.

Speech coding

Speech coding compresses digitized speech into a compact bitstream for transmission or storage and reconstructs it at the receiver, spanning waveform coders, vocoders, CELP standards like AMR and Opus, and neural codecs since SoundStream in 2021.

Speech community

Speech community, a core sociolinguistic unit of analysis: a group sharing interaction and, per Labov, evaluative norms rather than identical speech. Key alternatives: social networks, communities of practice, discourse communities.

Speech Discrimination Tests

Speech discrimination tests, now usually called word recognition testing, measure the percentage of standardized monosyllabic words a listener repeats correctly at suprathreshold levels; rooted in Egan's 1948 phonetically balanced lists and Hahlbrock's German test, they assess speech understanding in quiet and in noise.

Speech disfluency

Speech disfluency is an interruption in the flow of speech (fillers, repetitions, pauses, revisions). Also called dysfluency; distinguished from fluency disorders such as stuttering and cluttering, which it can indicate when severe.

Speech disorder

Speech disorder: impairment of articulation of speech sounds, fluency (stuttering), or voice as defined by ASHA; distinct from language disorder. Covers types, prevalence (3-16% of US children), and speech-language pathology treatment evidence.

Speech dysfluency

Speech dysfluency is a disruption of the rhythmic flow of speech, ranging from ordinary hesitations and repetitions to fluency disorders, chiefly stuttering and cluttering, with acquired forms following brain injury.

Oct 22, 2026

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays is a 1986 English collection of six essays by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, including his foundational essay on speech genres.

Speech or language disturbances

Speech or language disturbances (ICD-11 MA80) is a Chapter 21 symptom category covering acquired aphasia, dysphasia, dysarthria, and anarthria, excluding developmental disorders (6A01), autism (6A02), and speech dysfluency (MA81); ICD-10-CM equivalent R47.

Speech Perception

Speech perception: how listeners map highly variable acoustic speech signals onto phonemes, syllables, or words. Key issues are lack of acoustic invariance, the rise and fall of categorical perception, and continuous encoding.

Speech production

Speech production: converting a message into respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory movements. Covers coarticulation, Levelt's psycholinguistic model, and DIVA, SFC, Task Dynamics, and FACTS motor control models.

Speech Production Measurement

Speech Production Measurement (MeSH D013068): measurement of speech parameters such as pitch, loudness, voice quality, articulation, and prosody, using acoustic analysis, imaging, and clinical protocols.

Speech Reception Threshold Test

Speech Reception Threshold Test (SRT, spondee threshold): audiology test finding the lowest hearing level at which a listener repeats 50% of two-syllable spondaic words, used to cross-check the pure-tone audiogram.

Speech recognition

Speech recognition, also called automatic speech recognition or speech to text, converts an audio signal of spoken language into a text transcript, measured by word error rate.

Speech Recognition Grammar Specification

The Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) is a 2004 W3C standard that gives developers a syntax for specifying the words and word patterns a speech recognizer should listen for.

Speech separation

Speech separation is the signal processing and machine learning task of recovering individual speech signals from an audio mixture, underpinning speech recognition, mobile communication, and hearing aids.

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis, or text to speech (TTS), is the computer-generated production of human speech from text or symbolic input, serving accessibility tools like screen readers and navigation systems.

Speech Therapy

Speech therapy: assessment and treatment of speech, language, and swallowing disorders by speech-language pathologists (SLPs), credentialed via ASHA's CCC-SLP; covers pediatric speech sound disorders, post-stroke aphasia and dysphagia, and telepractice delivery.