Speaking Clearly Only Sounds Easy to Do!

By Dr. Judy Montgomery, CCC-SLP, Professor, Chapman University

One of the advantages that Jimmy and other children have in the elementary school years is speech therapy sessions at school!  Children learn how to produce the sounds that are difficult for them and usually in a very short time.  Then they have to practice until it becomes automatic.

Most speech difficulties are the result of later-maturing fine motor skills and intrusive oral habits that get in the way of clear speech.  Thumb sucking long after toddlerhood is one of those.  A few speech difficulties are due to more organic, or physical, problems like low muscle tone, poor dentition, an unusual shaped palate, or hearing loss.  The tongue is a very important muscle in speech production and must be moved precisely to touch various parts of the oral cavity  (mouth) to produce the correct sounds.  If the important tongue muscle is “off the target” just a few centimeters, the speech sound will be slushy, distorted, or even a different phoneme altogether.  As the child’s fine motor control improves, speech sounds become more precise and understandable to listeners. The tongue muscle becomes better toned, more pointed at the tip, and more accurate.

Lisping is a good example.   Lisping is the term we use when a speaker uses the /th/ sound for the /s/ sound.  It is a substitution of one sound for another.  It makes the word hard to understand.  If the child with a lisp wants to say the word “soup”, he needs to make a clear /s/ phoneme for the first sound in that word.  He needs to ALMOST close his front teeth and just leave a little space between them. Then he places his tongue up high in this mouth with the pointy tip just BEHIND, but not TOUCHING, his front teeth.  Then he sends a light stream of air over his tongue.  The air “skids” over the tongue and teeth, making a noisy, high pitched hissing sound.  That’s the /s/!   If he has his teeth open too far and his tongue peeks out, the air passing over will make a /th/ sound – a thicker, slower high-pitched sound.  That sound works fine if you want to say the word “thank”, but it does not work for “soup”!  That unwanted /th/ sound for an /s/ is called a frontal lisp.  Tongues seem to like to peek out when children are younger, so they must become more flexible, pointier and stay behind the front teeth to say a nice clear /s/ sound.

When children are very young, this lisp may sound cute or endearing.  In a few months it can become a speaking habit that is hard to break.   Most children can learn to make the typical /s/ sound and only use that /th/ sound when they really mean to!  Sometimes they listen closely to the speech of their friends and the adults around them, and correct it by themselves.  Sometimes they go to sessions with the speech language pathologist, learn what to do, and begin to use their new /s/ sound all the time. 

When Jimmy says “lerry” coke when he wants to say “cherry” coke, he uses the /l/ phoneme instead of the /t∫/ phoneme that begins the word cherry.  Just like the lisp, he substitutes one speech sound for another one.  His tongue is rounded, not pointy and goes up behind his front teeth to make the /l/ sound when he wants to pull his rounded tongue back further and use a sharp blast of air to make the /t∫/ sound.  His tongue is not quite skillful enough to make that combination of sounds yet.  Our tongue is one of several speech helpers that allow us to produce all the sounds we need for clear speech. Join us next time to learn about some other handy speech helpers!