I was trying to Google search this, but either I don’t know what to type in the search field, or the information isn’t out there.
Occasionally, I meet adults who cannot make the r sound or cannot make the s sound. These are native English speakers, and if I look closely at their face, I think it’s an abnormally shaped palate or jaw that’s creating the speech impediment. I’d like to find out more about what causes a person to have that physical malformity. However, when I google it, I get info on how those are the last sounds children master, how some people have some issue with brain development that causes speech disorders, or that people can have strokes/seizures etc. that can cause problems with speech. I’m having problems finding any sort of info on why a mouth might be shaped differently and how that can lead to speech deficits. Anyone know where I can find info on this?
It’s probably not anything about the way their mouths are formed. People who are tongue-tied, or have very narrow or high palates that need to be corrected by orthodontists don’t usually have speech impediments. People who have them usually aren’t going to gain the sound they are missing without speech therapy, because until they can produce it, they quite literally can’t hear it. I know several speech therapists, and they tell me that children who are in therapy because they are missing a sound, and have a substitution (like w for r) need to be taught how to physically make the sound they are missing, but once they do, they have an “Aha!” moment, because they actually hear the difference for the first time.
Foreign accents, if you are interested, happen because people don’t actually say the sound in the foreign language exactly right-- they say the closest sound in their native language to the target sound. The longer they use the second language, and the more they are exposed to hearing it, the closer and closer their ability usually gets to producing the correct sound. My father wanted to get rid of his American accent when he spoke Russian, so he actually saw a speech therapist when he lived in Leningrad, and his Russian was eventually so good, that a couple of times he got in a small amount of trouble because the Russian police wouldn’t believe he was an American.
Hmm. There are two people in particular I can think of, a classmate from high school and one from college, who had unusually pronounced speech impediments. One of them pronounced his s’s as “sh”, and the other had so much trouble with the r sound that the entirety of his speech was hard to understand. Both of them, when I look at them in pictures, appear as though their bottom jaw is shaped slightly different – like it’s not as thick and fully developed as most people’s. But it’s not real pronounced, and it’s possible that I’m seeing something that isn’t there as an attempt to find an explanation for their speech.
Neither one of them were intellectually deficient, and they could move around fine physically. What you’re saying makes sense with some of the milder speech impediments I’ve encountered, but for people to have such pronounced impediments in their late teens/early twenties seems like there’s more going on than just difficulty figuring out how to shape their mouths.
This was precisely the case for me. I don’t know how old exactly I was, but I did speech therapy because I wasn’t pronouncing 'r’s correctly, and I had absolutely no idea that I wasn’t getting it right. I had to be instructed very specifically as to how to produce the sound, and then it took me weeks of sessions in which I would read aloud various passages with increasingly difficult passages with 'r’s in them. I remember particularly having a lot of trouble of saying “drawer”.
My wife was a specialist in speech and hearing disorders. She agrees that only rarely (such as a cleft palate) does a speech impediment have an organic cause.
Like **Rivkah **says, many speech impediments can be eliminated by literally teaching the person to make the correct sound, which wouldn’t by the case with an abnormally shaped mouth.