Ask HN: My 7yo has lateral Lisp. Suggestions please?
My 7 year old son has lateral lisp. His pronunciations are not clear and takes effort to understand for outsiders. I am worried, he might be bullied at school because of this. We live in Paris and it is hard to get consulting hours with speech therapist during this pandemic. Do you have any suggestions to improve his pronunciations at home ourselves or using software?
As a kid, I had a tough time pronouncing, let alone distinguishing the vocal difference between -λιος and -γιος and other phonetically pronounced Greek words that demand attention to detail.
For instance, "sun" is called "ήλιος" but the way I was pronouncing it sounded like "ήγιος", which does not exist as a word, but sounded more like "υγιής" in a very wrong way.
My mother got petrified when she realized how I was using such words (be it ήλιος, ελιές, μαλλιά, Στέλιος and so forth), because my grandfather (her father-in-law) is a mumbler - lisper - stammerer...so hard to understand him.
So, she had to act quickly: she dedicated hours on me showing me in very slow visual motion the mouth / tongue muscle movements I should use and in what way so I could pronounce the words properly.
The approach kind of resembles to the procedure of how people learn to observe the mouth in Sign Language in order to understand what you are saying.
Her trick was to find words that either had a common beginning or end and pay extra emphasis on those to pronounce them correctly and then blend those two successful pronounciation on matching "problematic, lispy" words.
In shorter than 2 months, I was able to speak normally without a problem at all.
There are speech therapists here in the states offering online speech therapy. I think it would be a good idea to get some input from a professional at least an evaluation, even online.
I would try contacting local speech therapists directly and see if they offer or would try online sessions.
We tried some. But, I suspect he has tongue-tie, which might be causing this. I am not sure, if we should try exercises without knowing the root cause of the problem.
Don't cut him slack at home, be positively reinforcing. To this day when I go home I still have the notion in my head that I don't have to enforce my speech as much, hence if I spend too much time at home my lisp starts to come back.
For instance, "sun" is called "ήλιος" but the way I was pronouncing it sounded like "ήγιος", which does not exist as a word, but sounded more like "υγιής" in a very wrong way.
My mother got petrified when she realized how I was using such words (be it ήλιος, ελιές, μαλλιά, Στέλιος and so forth), because my grandfather (her father-in-law) is a mumbler - lisper - stammerer...so hard to understand him.
So, she had to act quickly: she dedicated hours on me showing me in very slow visual motion the mouth / tongue muscle movements I should use and in what way so I could pronounce the words properly.
The approach kind of resembles to the procedure of how people learn to observe the mouth in Sign Language in order to understand what you are saying.
Her trick was to find words that either had a common beginning or end and pay extra emphasis on those to pronounce them correctly and then blend those two successful pronounciation on matching "problematic, lispy" words.
In shorter than 2 months, I was able to speak normally without a problem at all.
Maybe this approach could help a bit?
You have nothing to lose; give it a try.
Good luck!
I would try contacting local speech therapists directly and see if they offer or would try online sessions.
https://www.sprintfrance.org/speechlanguage-pathologists
Maybe you have already read these blog posts on lateral lisps, but they seem useful with try-at-home programs:
* https://www.grahamspeechtherapy.com/blog/the-secret-to-corre...
* https://www.speechandlanguagekids.com/speech-therapy-frontal...
Thanks! I will read these articles.
Granted, I have an auditory form of ADHD.