Cyde Weys Musings

Speech therapy is a very interesting subject. It deals with no less than the fundamentals of human speech, which are deeply ingrained into all of us. I have personal experience in this area, so even though it’s slightly embarrassing, I feel compelled to write about it and share my experience. Hence this post. Heck, embarrassment is a thoroughly useless emotion anyway.

When I was younger, I had a slight speech impediment. In your life, you’ve almost certainly met kids who didn’t pronounce certain sounds correctly. I was one of them. I didn’t pronounce “R”s correctly. That’s a pretty common impediment. Most kids grow out of it on their own as they grow up. I did not. So, in eighth grade, I underwent speech therapy for a semester. That was all it took to fix my problem. Ever since, I’ve spoken normally, and I don’t often think about it anymore. The proper pronunciation of “R”s is now instinctual to me, just like the rest of the sounds in the English language.

The speech therapy class met once a week on Friday. I was just missing gym class to attend, so it didn’t affect me academically, though Fridays were “free” days in gym (where you could just play whatever sport you wanted to rather than being forced to do a specific set of things). So it was the one day a week in which I wasn’t glad to miss gym, but looking back on it, it was well worth it. I’m so glad that middle school contracted out for a speech therapist. She came in once a week to deal with a few small classes of students at a time. There were two other students who met with her during the period in which I had her.

I should point out that there was nothing physically wrong with me. I had just never learned the proper motions for my tongue to make the “R” sound correctly. Speech therapy was nothing more than a long series of repeated oral exercises to get me to learn how to shape my tongue properly to make the correct sound. I don’t remember the majority of the exercises anymore, but I do vividly remember how she used star-shaped sprinkles (like for topping ice cream or decorating cakes). She would have us place them on certain parts of our mouth and grab them with our tongues, or have us hold them in the center of our tongues, or all other sorts of exercises. I guess the reason she used those is because they were small, sticky when wet, and not only edible, but sweet. I wonder how many other speech therapists use similar confectioneries. There’s a whole field out there of very specialized knowledge on this subject that most people don’t know anything about.

Incidentally, the “R” sound is made by lifting the sides of your tongue to the roof of your mouth while keeping the center depressed. I couldn’t do that before the therapy. Those muscles in my tongue were completely un-exercised, and I didn’t even know, consciously or otherwise, which neural impulses to send my tongue to make that shape. The exercises in therapy taught me how. As a side effect of the therapy, I became able to roll my tongue up into a circle. I couldn’t before it.

During that semester of eighth grade when I was in speech therapy, I remember having to consciously focus on my speech as I was talking, thinking ahead a few words in every sentence I spoke and dreading the words with “R” sounds in them. Pretty quickly, though, I internalized the new tongue shape and integrated it as a routine part of my speech. I no longer had to think about it. At the end of the semester, I had learned all I needed to from the therapy, and would never need it again. The other two in the class weren’t so lucky; they were dealing with more serious impediments, and hadn’t made a serious dent in them.

One of the other guys in the class was a friend of a friend. He was nice, if shy, and he was trying to tackle a vicious stutter (which, it turns out, may be more of an anxiety problem). The other guy, though, had a bit of a mean streak. He was a Latino immigrant, but his problem didn’t stem from that (he understood and wrote English perfectly well). No, he had a problem with pronouncing long words in any language. He would stumble over or skip the last syllables in long words; he’s very lucky he wasn’t German. It was a much more complex issue than mine; I just had to learn one mouth shape. I was nice to him, but he was frequently mean in response. I don’t know if it was the embarrassment of being forced into speech therapy with us, or if he really was habitually mean, but he would pick on me occasionally when we ran into each other in the halls. Yet he would never go too far. He didn’t want any of his friends to see us talking, lest they wonder how we knew each other.

Going through speech therapy made me realize something important: there’s no speech problem that can’t be fixed if you tackle it from a low enough level, by learning the individual mouth and tongue shapes needed to make each sound of spoken language. At one of my previous jobs, I worked with a scientist who immigrated from northeast Europe decades ago. His English vocabulary was rich, his grammar impeccable. But his accent was nearly indecipherable. It took weeks before I fully picked up on all of his idiosyncrasies and was able to perfectly comprehend his speech without asking him to repeat himself. He didn’t have any clue of how badly his accent affected his ability to communicate.

Speech therapy, however, can easily fix these kinds of problems by teaching how to correctly make all of the sounds used in the language. Having gone through it myself, and seeing the great results, I would highly recommend it to others. You cannot overestimate how important it is to speak correctly. Let’s say, theoretically, I learn Japanese at some point in the future. My vocabulary and grammar are good. But I still have a bit of an accent stemming from the fact that I grew up speaking English, which uses a different set of sounds. If my accent was bad enough that it got in the way of native Japanese speakers understanding what I was saying, I wouldn’t give a second thought to seeing a speech therapist and learning how to properly speak the language. Viewing it as an investment, I’m sure it has much greater returns than even, say, going to college.

Speech therapy should not be overlooked. Lots of people have problems in their speech that need correcting, yet most don’t even know enough about speech therapy to consider it as an option. Some people are too idealistic, thinking it shouldn’t matter if they have a speech impediment, and that the problem really resides in someone who would make fun of them or discriminate against them for it. But the real world is not ideal; these kinds of things really do matter. People are judgmental, even if they don’t realize it consciously. The manner in which you speak really is one of the few areas in which you should strive to conform with the rest of your community as much as possible. If you have an impediment, it really is worth it to undergo speech therapy to fix it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 22:50 and is filed under Personal, Science. Keywords: Tags: speaking, speech, speech impediment, speech therapy, spoken language, therapy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.