S-s-s-speech Impediments

Bad habit or medical phenomena?

The Health of Youth by Florence Lyndon Meredith, published in 1928, has a whole section devoted to the voice. What caught my eye within this section was the paragraph on speech defects. As a former lisper, I guess I once had a speech defect.  It was kind of cute as a six year old to tell people that my brother's name was "s-th-tanley" and that "s-th-ally s-th-old s-th-ea shells on the s-th-ea shore."

But more importantly, why did I develop this speech impediment? How did I correct it? What do speech pathologists believe and practice now? These are all answers that I hope to divulge to you in this post.

An article in Chatelain by Judith Bond (1993) entitled Common Speech Problems points to one of the most common speech problems as stuttering.  Bond notes that while stuttering was once believed to be an emotional problem, the latest research points to physical problems.  The emotional problems probably come as a result of the lack of confidence and inability to speak.

Many other speech problems include lisp (not being able to pronounce s's), rhotacism (not being able to pronouns r's, which is also associated with not being able to pronounce the l's), misunderstanding speech, or enunciation problems.

Most of these problems are caused by a variety or combination of factors including physical, psychological, environmental, and genetic. Hutchinson notes some physical defects, saying that difficulty with enunciation may be due to the band of tissue under the tongue being unusually short or missing or protruding teeth. Stammering and stuttering, however, are "usually habits copied from another member of the family or  playmate...or shyness or some other personality trait." While this may be true, Dr. Hutchinson, there are also many physical, molecular, and genetic reasons for speech defects.

The genetic defects are further explained in Dissection of molecular mechanisms underlying speech and language disorders, an article by Simon Fisher in 2005 from Applied Psycholinguistics. Fisher points to the heritable defects common in speech. His analysis boils down to a mutation of the FOXP2 gene, which causes a rare form of speech and language disorders from early on in development. Although this gene is not the "speech gene" (since genes rarely cause one phenomenon in isolation), it does play a central role in the development of many tissues in mammal embryonic development, and may be an important piece in the speech puzzle.

However, many common speech problems, such as enunciation problems, stutters, lisps, and rhotacism can be corrected with speech therapy and practice, as seen in my own speech development and that of King George VI in The King's Speech (a great movie if you haven't seen it.)

Th-th-th-th-thats all folks!