The formal study of communication has always moved across academic disciplines. Those who study the act of producing speech are known as Speech Therapists, Speech Pathologists, or Communication Therapists. Some students of information processing call their subject communication, as do some electrical engineers and those who study telecommunications systems such as those which internationally link telephone and computers.
Today the study of communication thus interfaces/overlaps with areas such as business, organizational development, philosophy, languages, composition, theatre, debate (often called "forensics"), literary criticism, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, semiotics, international policy, economics and political science, among others. The breadth and the primacy of communication in many areas of life is responsible for the ubiquity of communication studies, as well as for the resulting confusion about what does and does not constitute communication.
