Of course there are experts I can consult for a fee about something like this. But I wonder if knowledgable people here might be able to say something.
My wife is worried and I am not. What she is worried about is the possibility that our kid will not learn to say ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds correctly. She is afraid he will be one of those kids who turns these sounds into ‘w’ sounds. The reason she is afraid of this is because, right now, he usually does say ‘w’ instead of either ‘l’ or ‘r’.
The reason I’m not worried is because he’s only just turned three and I think this is pretty usual for someone his age. However, I don’t know this is usual, so that’s where some knowledgable or resourceful person might be able to say something. Another reason I am not worried is because he doesn’t always mispronounce l’s and r’s. I have not been able to do an extensive study of this to check for regularities, but I know for a fact that I have heard him say “wight saber” instead of the dreaded “wight sabew,” and “carry” instead of “cawwy.” I also know that when I explicitly prompt him to say “Ella” instead of “Ewwa” he does so with (AFAICT) no trouble. If I don’t prompt him and he spontaneously says that name, he says “Ewwa,” but if I say “Say ‘Ella’” with maybe a bit of emphasis on the ‘l’ sound, he says it right every time. I take all of this, together, to mean he’s doing fine. But am I not being cautious enough?
It’s something that a speech therapist can get corrected real quick, once they can make the kid understand what they are doing wrong. I don’t think at that age they can have the kid do the exercises to correct pronunciation problems. Everyday for a month I had to repeat a consonant for 30 minutes a day the way the therapist said to do it. I had no idea why I couldn’t say it correctly until the therapist visit. It could be a physical problem, but I doubt that it is. Give a speech therapist a call and see what they think.
I’m not an expert in the field but both of my kids did this (one of them, three, still does). The older one, who is now eight, doesn’t anymore.
Both exhibit(ed) the same thing you describe. When I ask them to carefully pronounce a word with ‘r’ in it they can. But in casual conversation they slur them into the ‘w’ sound.
I’m going through this now with the Bubster (he’s 3.) Damn Wonder Pets show has a cute little ducky who has a speech impediment, and it got picked up on. I’ve banned the show, and everyone in the house is now enunciating ve-e-e-r-ry slo-o-o-w-w-ly so that Bubster will pick back up on the “r” sound. It’s maddening, but important!
If your son is only three, and he does pronounce his "r"s sometimes, then it should work itself out. Just pay close attention to how those around him talk, because - as we all know - kids will imitate anything they hear. I don’t know how quickly your kid learns (Everyone’s MMV, and all that) but if he hasn’t improved after a length of time, then you may want to pull out the big guns.
My sister did this when she was a toddler. She used to pronounce “v” as “b”. Biolin, Bimto etc. She grew out of it and didn’t see a speech therapist.
I also was unable (or unwilling) to pronounce “th” sounds properly (I pronounced them “ph”). I can still remember my mum telling me to pronounce “the” properly, I think I was aged four then. I can pronounce “the” correctly now (kind of :D).
My daughter couldn’t pronounce quite a few of her consonants when she was a preschooler. (“I’m a good girl” came out as “I’m a dud dew.”)
We hoped she would grow out of it, but ultimately we started speech therapy when she was 5. She’s 8 now and is almost done – she’s working on “R” and hopefully will have mastered it by the end of the summer. (It hasn’t be continuous. She plateaued after the first year so we took a year off to let her mature a bit before they attacked the last few mispronunciations.)
I am not a speech therapist, but three is a little young to start worrying. Keep an eye on him and see if he starts to improve. If a year from he’s still doing it, take him to be evaluated.
My daughter had the same issue with r – could pronounce it correctly in the middle or end of a word, but not at the beginning. At her five year physical her pediatrician said, “You need to get her to a speech therapist. What was okay at four, is no longer okay at five.”
So we saw a speech therapist. It took about six months to get it all sorted out (we were working on S also) and homework included stuff like drinking thick shakes through small straws and blowing bubbles. My daughter thought it was the best thing ever.
If you get worried, it should be pretty easy to take him in for an evaluation with the county. It’s often free. Everyone I know who has done it has loved it and the kids have enjoyed the therapy.
However, I agree with your feeling that you shouldn’t worry yet. If he’s only just barely 3, I don’t think it’s any big deal, since he can also do it correctly. He’ll probably grow out of it, but if there’s no progress in a year, I’d take him in.
My kids were prone to imitation at that age–the older one would talk like Baby Bear on Sesame Street and I had to remind her a lot to speak correctly. The younger one still likes to imitate that Wonder Pets duck. It drives me a bit crazy and I don’t tolerate much of it. So my advice is, don’t let him watch Baby Bear or Wonder Pets!
We have several little friends with similar speech problems, only they’re constant and not going away even at 5 and 6. I’m starting to wonder about them, but maybe the older ones are doing therapy at school. I sure hope so.
If it helps…my oldest son had a speech impediment from the time he started talking. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until his younger brother became more understandable–the baby was only 2 and the oldest was almost 6!
Off he went to kindergarten. I asked for a speech evaluation when I enrolled him, and the speech therapist referred to his impediment as “moderate/profound.” I don’t remember how many sounds she tested, but he was off on about 2/3 of them. So it was a big deal, apparently.
But you know, he went to speech therapy a couple of times a week, and by 1st grade, he’d been released because all was well.
Your fellow is still very young, but he should be eligible for services if you want to have him evaluated. Call your local social services department, or the nearest school, and ask for a referral. I don’t know if the evaluation would be free (I think so, though), but certainly any corrective therapy should be.
Don’t worry, though. He’ll be fine…kids usually overcome these things pretty easily.
I have a three-year-old, and I can totally understand your wife!
I am not a speech pathologist, but I do have a background in linguistics and have studied child language. I think it would be more surprising if a child pronounced l and r properly at three than not!
Children are expected to consistently pronounce liquids properly by about 5. (See here and here. The latter has a checklist/quiz about language development.) So you definitely don’t have anything to worry about for the time being.
I remember that many of my friends could not properly pronounce ‘Gila’ (my real first name, with a hard ‘g’, long ‘e’) until I was about five or so. They all seemed to figure it out by then without any help.
Our speech pathologist said that the R/W sounds are often not finalized until 8, and that we should just forget about worrying about that one for a few years.
Hey freekalette,
Isn’t the wonder pets song the most infectious ear-worm you’ve ever heard?
*
“Wonder pets! Wonder Pets! We’re on our Way.
Working together to save the day.
We’re not too big and we’re not too tough
But when we work together we’ve got the right stuff!”
Winnie, Tuck and Ming-Ming too
We’re Wonder pets and we’ll help you. *
-you’re welcome
trupa, whose kid has watched all 8 episodes on the DVD for two weeks in a row.
My nephew used to call my parents “Dampa” and “Nama” when he was about two, but it wasn’t a permanent condition. Often the kid can hear the difference even if he can’t pronounce it himself, so you might want to figure out a way to determine if this is the case. If it is, you probably have nothing to worry about.
OK, I’m not Freekalette, but yes, it is the most infectious thing ever. I find myself singing it at random all the time. I hate Wonder Pets, but my kids love them and they’re wholesome and I do kind of like the bizarro pseudo-opera format.
The phone…the phone is ringing! The phone…we’ll be right there!
The phone…the phone is ringing! There’s an animal in trouble! cue Ming ming
There’s an animal in twubble!
I have to admit I find her mispronunciations cute. Which makes no sense, because I find the same thing in Baby Bear to be grating.
And thank you, bellybean, for your links. They made me worry less about my four year old’s inability to correctly voice “th.” Turns out she’s got four more years to work on that one before we need to be concerned.
When I was seven years old my two front teeth fell out at the same time. The school sent me to speach therapy because I had a lisp. Go figure. Speach therapy consisted of writing 30 words that began with S. Not saying them, writing them. Over and over. And while a small group of us were in speach therapy, the rest of the class was having their math lesson. So then we were behind in math.
My mom got ticked off and pulled me out of therapy and said they could evaluate me again when my teeth grew back.
This article from webmd might be useful for you: speech and language development. It’s also got a few links on the second page to charts talking about development from 1-3 years, from 3-5 years, and some “normal mistakes” that kids make when learning.
It says:
Anecdote: What you described seems normal for that age, to me. One cousin had a pretty bad lisp when she was that age, but grew out of it quickly. She’s almost a teenager and has spoken normally since she was around 6 or so, without any therapy. She could also slowly pronounce words correctly when prompted, but when she said something without prompting it came out wrong.
Anyway, my almost three year old does this a little, but what’s more frustrating to me is his older brother, whom is six, will often mime baby talk when conversing with his little brother, I suppose because he thinks he’s “being on his level”.
Thing is, the two year old understands regular speech just fine, so I’m always on my eldest son to knock it off and quit encouraging “baby talk”.
