Teaching the /L/ Sound

All right, so a little better now. Welcome back to the Monday Lives. As you can hear, my voice is still not 100 back yet. Still a little what we call hyponasality, meaning there's a lack of the nasal sound, and it sounds like it's muffled. Right. And that's because I had Covid for the past eight days. It's just really tiring. Okay, so we're back, and today we're talking about L sounds, right? I know we don't really talk a lot about speech sounds in our channel, whereas if you look at other speech therapists, they tend to talk about how to do the R sound or do whatever. So why we're doing the L is because last week, as you, if you remember, we had the course, the new course called Speech Disorders Crash course, right? So that is to teach you how to correct some speech sounds at home yourself. And I've done some of the articulation screeners that is included as a bonus. Right. So you can sign up for that bonus inside of the link in the description. But anyways, so I heard, out of the few that I did just listening to the sounds that the kids were doing, the L sound was. The majority of the kids had a L problem. Like a L. That, that, that's, that's. That's the L sound. Now, the problem with that. So we're going to talk about how to fix it. All right? And of course, inside of the course that I talk about, we'll talk. It goes into a little more detail, and you can watch it over and over if you want to. Okay? So first of all, if you think about it, the L sound. Why does a kid. How do you pronounce. How do you produce the L sound? So L sound is what we call alveolar sound. What's alveolar ridge? That's, that's the name for. It is the hard bone right behind the upper front teeth. So right behind the upper front teeth, there's a. There's a hard bone there called the alveolar ridge. Your tongue needs to touch that. And then you. You vibrate your vocal cords and vocalize, and you are like that. Okay? And it creates the L sound. All right? So obviously it's not always 100% like that. You know, like you can put the tongue up to the alveolar ridge and still do it. Ah. Ah. Like that, right? It's not always like that, but nine times out of 10, if you tell a kid to put their tongue up there and vocalize, you will get an L. Sound like, like that, right? So usually when a kid, they're not able to do L sounds, they either change it into a Y, which what we call gliding, okay? So the name itself doesn't matter. It's just better. It's easier for you to search what the. What we call process. The process is. Right? The error is like from L to a Y to a Y. Y. Y sound is gliding. So the L glides into Y. There are usually a few reasons why. The first reason is that the kid doesn't know that the tongue needs to go up top and touch there for the L sound, right? They probably don't know or they don't know how, right? So the reason why they don't know might be that they cannot hear the difference between the L and the Y. And then this is something I have to teach you. And that's what we call like a phonological issue, right? If you cannot hear the difference between the two sounds. So for instance, if a kid, let's say in a very layman term, right, you're not, for argument's sake, because you're listening to me, speak English, you cannot hear the difference between a th and F. Right? So if you and right. It sounds around the same. But if you are very good at this, this language English, then you can, you're able to differentiate the. The two sounds, right? So what you're going to do now is, is to make sure that your child can hear between the two. Okay? And I, I understand this video is very niche, is very specific to a specific situation, but why not? I, I believe that the best way, if you know, it doesn't need to appease the masses every time, right. If we talk about, like virtual autism or whatever, you get a lot of views, right? But it doesn't matter to me. Okay, so the L sound, I want you to think about this framework for every type of sound that you might want to learn. Like, you might want to teach your kid. So if we go like and Y, like L and Y, you need to be able to differentiate between the two, which is what we call minimal paired contrast. Right? So candate hear the difference between the. And the Y, these two sounds, Right? And if they can, can they? You start using words that are only different between L and the Y. All right? So let me say. Hi. Hi. Hi, Ankita. How are you? So, for instance, if you have the word like and yike with a Y in front, right. Are they able to. Is your child able to differentiate between these two sounds? All right, so that's that's something you have to check. And that's what we do during articulation test, right? Is that if we find out there are some phonological errors, then we will try some minimal contrast. But the problem is that a lot of parents, they don't know about this. It's quite specialized knowledge. Not saying it's hard, it's just specialized. The difference between learning how to teach speech and learn how to teach language is that language you don't need so much like understanding of the sound and such, right? You just need to go ahead and teach longer sentences. And it's intuitive because you're a master of language already because you're talking and full on sentences and you can communicate like I am right now. Whereas speech, you need to totally understand what sounds they are, right? Again, I apologize for my stuffy nose. Still, I think I've recovered, but are still some symptoms. Anyways, so in order to do, to do the speech part, you need to learn a little bit more about the background and what like how the sounds are made. So going back to the L sound, if they can hear the difference between the L and the, and the Y, which is like a lot of times I'm saying this because a lot of times that's how the error is. Like, is it like 100% like the errors will always be like that then not really, right? Not really. Not really. All right, so Ankita says, well, what do you say? My daughter says Y for L, not the, not the sound of Y. O. I don't understand what that means. Can you let me know what you mean? Bushra. What's up? Hi. And yeah, like that, the L and the Y after they, your, your kid can differentiate, right? Then we know that they can actually hear the difference. Then we know that it's actually that they cannot do the L placement. So like I just said, if the tongue can go up, that's where the place should be, right? So there are some words you got to learn, right? So the placement is where your articulators go when you need to make those sounds. What are your articulators? Your lip, your jaw and your tongue. All right, Those are articulators. They're things that, they're instruments of making sounds, right? So let me give you some examples. For instance, M, like M, the letter M is based at the placement of which is the lips. It's called bilabial sound there a lip sound. So we go, you know, the lips come together, right? Bilabial meaning two lips, right? So anyways, in order to teach the tongue going up, the first thing is to check if your child. Child can say, can put the tongue up. Yeah, like that. Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. So you got to check the minimal pairs first. Got to check if you can. She can hear between la and ya. You know, like have a piece of paper. One side is la, one side is ya. Tell her to point. Right. Which one is lot? This one. Which one's? Yeah, this one. Good. Which one's? Yeah, good. This one. Which one's lot? This one. All right, maybe I'll talk about it in a little more detail later on. Okay, so to check that, usually what I use is a cotton bud, and I like, just tell the kid to follow the column bud with the tongue. So obviously if you're teaching speech, your child's language ability needs to be at a certain degree where you can instruct the kid to do some stuff or else it's very difficult. So when you put a column, but you follow and you go up top like that. Okay, so if your child can do it, then that means probably didn't really realize that the L required such a. Such a placement and therefore you just need to go from there. Right. And what if your child cannot? Right. So, so a lot of parents will. Will ask me, is my child, does he have a tongue tie? Right? It's a hit topic if I talk about a tongue ties or lip ties or whatever. Actually, lip tie is not as hit because you can literally see a lip tie. It's very easy to. To see it or as a tongue tie. A lot of even therapists around in, in. In. In. In Southeast Asia, they would say, oh, your kid, you gotta check out for tongue ties because it hurts language development. Yes, but it's also like, there's a degree of tongue tie, right? You can have super tongue tie and you can have like semi little bit tongue tie, and everyone is kind of tongue tied, you know, like, look at me. If you can see that membrane pulling on it, and you know, I have a whole YouTube video about it. So you can go check it out. You can search agents of speech tongue tie, and you will learn about tongtai. But, but we're not here to talk about tongue tie, okay? If your child. Very easy way to see. If your child, you see that the tongue is going up, but then you see that the membrane here is turning very white and it's pulling the tongue down and not allowing that range of movement, then that is a tongue tie. Right? But if it doesn't and it's like, it's kind of stuck. It doesn't know how to go up. Then it's probably not a tongue tie, right? So tongue elevation, as we call it in our industry, like that, to do the L sound is quite often a problem of tongue coordination. And there are loads of words out there for, you know, tongue coordination. What's that called? The association? Maybe I got the word wrong, but whatever, right? So you gotta understand how the tongue develops motorically. So the tongue starts off going in and out, right? To do a suckling motion. To drink milk, right? Whether it's on a nipple or on a bottle, doesn't matter. It goes in and out, in and out, in and out. To feed, right to drink. Second of all, the, the tunnel learns how to go left and right. So left and right is to control, is to control the food inside of your mouth. So put something in your mouth, you flip it to the, to the molars, the big teeth over here, in order to chew, to masticate is the crazy word. After that, your tongue kind of puts it back in the middle and then swallows, right? So swallowing, actually you don't need a, there's no development for that, you know, like there's the development for that, but there's a reflex for, for which, so you don't need to like consciously do it, right? So after the tongue goes left and right, it learns how to go up and down. Now there's no, you don't need your tongue to know how to go up and down in order to eat. So therefore it's, it's entirely for speech, right? And so, you know, a lot of people, if they do like oral motor exercises, they exaggerate the tongue motion like a hundred times. Like licking some like chocolate paste outside of the cheek, like here. Like what, what is the point for that? There isn't too much of a point because when we talk we certainly don't go, ah, like there's, there's no speech down that uses that type of tongue movement, right? And the other thing is, if you're eating, you also don't do that yet. Well, maybe when we need to clear something on our mouths, right? But then we have tissue for that and we have our hands, so we don't really need to do that, right? So at the end of the day it's not really that functional. That's what I mean, right? So Pauline says, two year old says wo. Wolf or lolo? So a huge disclaimer here. First, like the L sound should be totally mastered by around Four to four and a half in some countries, in some cultures, maybe five. So if your child is at two, three, I think even four, it's permissible not to do the L sound. Okay. It's really permissible because they're still developing their speech sounds, and there's a development for each thing. So a lot of times when parents will say, oh, can you fix these sounds for me? I'm like, no, not yet. For instance, the s Sounds right. Ls th right? The harder ones, like J? These ones I wouldn't touch either. If they're, like, below four, I would not touch those for now. So don't worry about that, Pauline. Just here, learn what you learn right now and maybe think about how to use this framework for other sounds. And I usually won't touch speech abilities until three around, because their language and the behavior just doesn't allow you to teach them. All right. Just doesn't allow you to teach them something like just speech sounds. Right. Anyways, so Mary says, oh, thanks, man. I am back. That's right. So, yeah, where was I? I was talking about going left and right first. Right. So you have to teach what we call tongue lateralization first in order to teach tongue elevation, because developmentally speaking, it goes left and right first and then up and down. So if your child can do left and right, then you got to teach left and right first. Right. It's basically kind of like learning to run before you walk, so to speak. Okay, so can you directly go to up and down and teach them out? Yes. But it's going to be really, really hard for you, right? I wouldn't. I wouldn't want that. And for whatever therapy, whatever you're teaching, it doesn't matter if it's therapy or not. Teaching in itself should be progressive, meaning it's at a place where the child can. Or the person can and slowly push them towards something where they cannot. Right. So therefore, starting with something nonsense like tongue lateralization left and right actually has its merits. Now, when we're doing tongue left and right, we don't want to do it in a way that is way outside. As I said, that's over exaggeration. We don't use it Right. So for the very same reason, if we're learning a motion for sports, we don't exaggerate that motion. Right. Because we're not going to use that. That. That range, so to speak. Yeah. So how do you do left and right? So remember the cotton bud? We go here and we just show your kid how to go. I Got just left and right, left and right. See if they can. Most kids, if they cannot do the left and right, their whole head moves, okay? They go like. Like that. And the reason is because they cannot separate between the tongue and the neck muscles, right? They're not that coordinated. Whereas some. Some kids will actually move the jaw just to make the. Make it happen. Like. Like that. Like that. And you will see it happen when you tell them to go up, their whole jaw goes forward and tries to go up, right? And whereas maybe they can, with their jaws, help. They can. Like that. But at the same time, imagine like the reason why they can't. Can't do that. The l sound. And the word is because, for instance, if they. They're trying to say a sentence like I like to jump, right after the I, the jaw has to come back and come back down in order to do the L. So like I like to jump job. It's impossible. If you speak a little faster, you're going to delete that L. So that's why you need to. Like I. I always say oral motor exercise is kind of a waste of time. Most of the time. Most of the time. But you didn't know why you're doing it. In this case, is this. Or motor? Yeah, kind of. Yes. Right. You're doing tongue lateralization. So left and right, slowly move up. Imagine your tongue, your mouth as a clock. Go like 3 o' clock or 9 o', clock, right? Goes to 11 o' clock and then go to like. What's the other side? 1 o', clock, right? And then slowly move to 12, which is where we want to hit there. And after that? And after that, what you want to try is once you can go up to the top slowly, progressively, right? Stay there, stay there for three seconds. And then teach them to do the vocalization up top. And got like that, right? So once you get that, the next step is to use the L in the sound. So now you can try, like you can try to do, for instance, la, li, lu, le. Those are like constant plus the vowel, right? So that's something that you can, you can start on after that, what we call CV level. So I know I'm throwing these terms at you. I really cannot put it into a succinct small video. That's why I made the course. You can go check it out in this description and then. Oopsies. That's very loud. Anyways, so after the cv, you go into real words, right? Real words. But then you only want to target the words with the l. Starting with L. Yeah. And that's what we call, like, L initial word. Right. And it might be mono, syllabic, one syllable. Or like. Like di. Syllabic, polysyllabic. These words, you got to know it in order to search it online. There are loads of free tools, free videos, free pictures out there for you to check if you know the words. All right. Because no one's going to write in a way like, oh, words that start with a L. Speech therapy with one syllable, no one's going to write. People are going to write L initial monosyllabic words. You know, like that. That's how we communicate. Right? Right. Concise and precise. So Ankita says daughter 7. Doesn't really say L. M and N. Can I do some tongue exercises? I mean, like, M is. There's no tongue involved with M. Right. So I. I think you really have to understand why that's the case. Have you seen a speech therapist? Right. N is at the same place as l, so. And L. The only difference is that the N has a nose. Has nose sound. Right. Has a nasality with it. Right. So it's not really about the tongue exercises. Maybe like the L, you can try left and right first and see elevation to check if she has it or not. But for M, usually speaking, M is like the first sound that any kid would learn, other than the H, maybe right after the vowels, maybe it would be m or h and they would say mama or whatever. Right. M is always the first because it's highly resonant, meaning you use your nose and go. It's very. It's very. Like how to say it's very. It's very special. And second of all, it's. It's very visual because you can see the mouth go, go together and go like that. Right. So I'm more concerned about the M here on Ankita because, like, if she doesn't have M, there might be a problem that we need to know about why. And speech therapy in, in particular, articulation, you have to know exactly why the speech errors are present, or else it's like you're not. You're just doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason that it's not going to work. It's very different from language where, you know, just add one more word after the sentence. It'll work. Right. Just make sure that the kid's motivated. Yeah. Just ask questions and make sure they don't feel like these are just golden nuggets. It's very easy. Whereas speech, you got to know something that's why we have a course about it. Nana Wedding. I guess your name is Nana. S is very, very complicated, all right? There are loads of different. There's loads of different S errors. So there's a few, so to speak, like that I can tell you right now. So that's why we have a course about it. And the course is going to go through all the S sounds. L, S, arrows. I'm just going to tell you as much as I can right now. The first one. The first one is like this as a deletion of S, right? So you don't have S anymore. That's a deletion. Second is like. Is what we call a substitution. Maybe S becomes a T, which is means it's stopped, right? So for instance, if they try to say sam, it becomes, damn, that's stopping. That's you stop the S. It could be that the S was what we call lateralized, meaning the air isn't coming from the middle, is coming from the sides, which becomes like. Instead of saying sam, it becomes slam. Like that. It could happen. It happens a lot, right? The other one might be like what we call palletization of S, which means it sounds like sh more than S. So it goes shh, sham, right? Or it might be a dentalized, which I see a lot nowadays, especially in Southeast Asia. I don't know why. So instead of saying sam, they go. And it breaks my ears hearing all the S's in the world because I'm now slightly professionally trained. And these type of speech errors, I didn't used to have this problem. And I'm sure that once you get used to it, you know it, you know, you. You're aware of it and then you start hearing it, right? So it's very hard. So Nana says, referring to a lateral S. Oh, that's super hard, man. It's also a very niche topic. Natural Ss, you know, they span until a very long time. It might be even. What's that called? Even secondary school students might be having a problem with it. You know, if your child is over seven, you must tell them there's a need for them to actually listen and learn about speech sounds. Or is it very difficult? The motivation is the most important part. The second part is being aware of the sound difference. So if you can identify the lateral S. I'm saying he because 90% of lateral Ss are kit are guys, right? I'm just saying this from experience. No, no data, no nothing. Just telling you from what I see, okay. From my short years As a speech therapist, lateral S is mostly kids. Mostly. Mostly boys. So lateral S, you know, like, maybe I'll talk about this in a different video, but basically you just need a. If you search online, there are loads of methods, right? There's one called the. Which I put in a course as well. It's called straw method, right? And what the straw method does is that now I'm getting very geeky here. I'm very nerdy. So if you don't want to hear what's a lateral S, you know, by all means, please don't listen. But what I mean is lateral S is when the air flow escapes the mouth from two sides. That's why it's lateral on the side. Right? Lateral means side. Whereas you want the. The. The. The air to go in the middle, right? So how do you do that is to make sure that the kid knows how it feels like for the. For the. For the wind. For the air to escape from the middle. So that's why you use a straw. You put it here and. And you try to tell them to go. And then it won't be a S. It won't be a S because the air goes inside of the. Of the straw, right? So that's what you need to do first. Establish the correct airflow before anything else. Okay. The reason why there's a lateral, if you think about it, is because the tongue is right in the way of the. Of the air that's coming out, right? So the, the straw method is widely documented, I believe. So if you search like lateral S, draw, you know, or lateral S therapy, whatever, then. Then, then you will actually find a lot there. If not, you know, I'll talk about this maybe next time. Nana, about Ss and so on. Ankita says she goes, but not Ma. So then can she even say a word? Right. What if it's a. Is it a language problem or a speech problem Here? Most problem. A speech problem. But can she even say a word? That's. That's my question to you. If she doesn't say a word. These aren't your. This isn't really your. What you should be currently, you know, be. Be thinking about, right? That's not something that you should be worried about at the moment. Yeah, no, no, no, no problem. I mean, yeah, it's a lot of knowledge. I try. I'll try my best. And then, you know, like, for. For more stuff. Go join the. Go join the speech disorder course. Although you only have one sound most probably, which is the S. I'm not sure. Right. So, I mean, that's pretty much it for the. For today's. Tonight's video. I don't want to go too overboard with too much. Too much stuff because basically it is. Teaching speech sound is rather difficult. That's why I've been putting it off for a very long time. So Agents of Speech has been around for like nearly three years now since the pandemic has. Hasn't begun. Right. So I really think that at the end of the day, once, I just want to put all my knowledge online, that's all. And if I can do it within one video, I will. But if it requires a lot of videos, then I'd rather put it in a course and that's easier, you know, so. Wow, Nana, thanks for the super sticker. Means a lot. And you're from Singapore. That's great. Actually got my. My covet from Singapore, you know, like, that's crazy. There was this guy on the airplane that was like coughing like crazy and I got it next to him and I was stupid enough to like open my mask because I was like kind of. Kind of drowsy. I was sleeping. I woke up and I. I saw some, excuse me, some bread in front of me and I was like eating it. And then by that time it was too late. The guy also opened his mouth and he was eating too many of coughing. So I'm like, dude, if I get Covid, this is probably it. And yeah, it was. But anyways, that's it for tonight, guys. If you have any more requests for sounds, let me know what like in the comment section because I'm always updating the course and I'll try my best to put as many, as many videos as I can inside of the course and also on. On the YouTube channel. So it doesn't as. You know, like, so that you can have somewhere to see what to do. And most of the time is that there are. So actually what I'm trying to tell you is that therapists like myself, we also learn this stuff from somewhere, you know, like, no matter if it's from a. From a. From a textbook that, you know, like got eaten up by a termite, one of my termites around here. And the other thing is there's so much stuff on the Internet, but you need to know the names, the words for it. For instance, if you didn't know the sound is like a lateral S, then how would you find it if you didn't know that? Oh, there's a method called the Butterfly method. There's something another thing for you. If you search butterfly method for S, that's also one of the ways that we teach lateralize S, but that's a little more abstract for a kid to understand. Understand how to make like a butterfly shape with your, with your, with your tongue. Like, ah. I can't really do it myself either, so I never use it because of that. So you can, you can check. There's loads of resources, right? There's people from the 1980s, 1990s who have written online about how to teach certain sounds, which still works to this day. But I, I want to tell you something about S before I go. All right, so I'll talk about this more next week on the S video. But basically the S is also called the alveolar sound. And what that means is a lot of people would think, especially therapists would think that the tongue would go up to create the S sound. But actually a study has shown that for all s sounds, 80% of people actually put their tongues down at. Below here, right? And like 20% actually just go up a little bit and create like a ridge between the tongue and the upper palate. So it's actually harder to do the latter. The 20% thing I do the easy one. I put my tongue down and then I go. I got my tongue tip is down under in my lower teeth. So given that in mind, if you think about a lateral, S is, is that the tongue is in the way. Most probably is that the tongue is in the position that doesn't allow airflow to the middle. So usually what I say is to put the tongue down, put the straw in and just blow. And maybe like a hundred times later they can generalize it to towards S, maybe. Okay, so I'll talk about this more in the next week's video. All right. Yeah, don't be sorry. I don't think it's you. I think it was an Indonesian guy. Anyways, so that's all. I'll see you guys. Happy to be back. I'll see you guys next week. I feel a lot better already. Thanks for all the, like, kind messages on email. I really appreciate it. And that's pretty much it, guys. I'll see you guys. But.