Teaching the /s/ sound

Oh, hey, guys. Welcome to our Monday lives. Today I'm coming to you from Hong Kong. And as you can see from the background, I'm in a quarantine camp. But that doesn't stop me from continuing to serving you guys. So the first thing we're going to talk about today is there's only one thing, actually. It's about teaching the S sound. So a parent from. A parent from last week, when I was still at home, she asked if I could teach the S sound. So I, I talked about it a little bit, right? And the S sound, let me just go through, like, some of the features, what it is. So it's very important for you to understand why and how and what are the sounds like, because if you don't know what, what the sounds are like, right, like why we're teaching it, or like, what was the error? What are the characteristics, then it's very hard for you to teach sound. Okay, so the first thing that S sound is a continuous sound, right? So let me say hi to Helena. Hi, Helena. But anyways, like, that sound is a continuous sound. What I, what do I mean by continuous sound? So it keeps on going, right? It's, it's like, it doesn't, it's supposed to be long. So it's not like a stopping sound, like a P, a T or K, A S sound is a sound that goes long. Okay? So this S sound is also airy sound, what we call a fricative. What does that mean? So fricative is when there's friction in the air that creates that sound. Okay, so instead of this M sound, it's more like how to say this M sound is continuous, but it's not airy, it's nasal, right? So whereas the S sound is more of a friction from the air. So you create a, you create an airstream that goes between your tongue and also your alveolar ridge. Okay, so we talked a little bit about alveolar ridge. And what it is, is the hard bony structure that is right behind the front, your upper front teeth behind here. So the first thing you have to think about when teaching any sound is to try doing it yourself. All right, so if you go to agentsofspeech.com right, like we have a course about, like speech delay speech, speech disorder that. I haven't put the link here, but you can go, just go to agentsofspeech.com speech to check out, like, the, the framework that I teach parents to use, which a lot of, like, just everyone uses that as a therapist, if you have, you know, taken. Taken a master's or whatever. Right. So given what I said, when should you teach this S sound? Right. So usually we start teaching S on around four, four and a half. Because the S sound is something that is rather difficult and if you have a professionally trained ear like myself, I don't prime myself in terms of that. But you know, I'm just telling you that I hear it mispronounced a lot. Okay, so Sarah, is. Is that how I pronounce your name? Sahara. Sara. Good morning as well. I guess you're in the usa. And this S sound is very, very important in a lot of languages. For instance, in English we use it a lot. It comes with blends as well, like st. Sp. Sw, you know, like what else? Str. Like strength. Right. So it's very important that strings along with like the other consonants and it's a very high frequency sound. High frequency, not like as in it is a high frequency. But what I mean is like it happens a lot inside a, of a language system. So that's also a high frequency sound for like China. In Chinese, S is very, very important. So we do, we actually do teach S asap if it's, it's something that is missing within the child's sound system. So we would say that around four and a four and four and a half. It would start. Okay. Okay. So Mary asked, when should kids learn th sound like thirsty Thursday. Well, the thing is Mary, like the, the answer to that is to do with the culture where you are. Right. So if you were in the uk, let's say then it would be a little more proper for the kid to learn this around, I don't know, like four and a half to five. Right. Whereas in, in Hong Kong we don't, we don't even teach it because we don't speak English. Right. So it really depends. And plus it's getting more and more socially acceptable to replace the th with a F. And I think this is like there's a study saying that, oh, within 20 years or something that th sound will be gone because everyone's just going to start using like, like this first day like, like that. And I have friends that, who do that already. Right. I, I really have a friend that, who grew up with me. He's using like F for TH's and he's spoken English for his like the majority of his life. So you know, like it's, it's actually okay. So Mary asks, so is it normal for a three year old? Yes, of course. Th is a Sound that should be mastered at around like five or like five to six, you know, so don't worry if. If the th is gone. Let me just see. Sorry, sorry. Getting your. If I'm butchering your name, please let me know. My son has speech therapy almost two months, but he can speak one words. Yeah, he can still speak any one. I guess what you mean is, like, he's been in speech there for two months, but he can only speak in one words, Right? So we're not talking about that today. Maybe you have a question you want to ask, then you could, but I don't know how to comment about that. All right, so the S sound is something that. Let's talk about different errors that happen in the S. Because the S is something is one of the sounds that can go really wrong because just everyone's S's are a little bit different anyways. So 80% of the time there are two ways that someone will produce an S. So I want you to try with me if you're watching this. So if you go, right, I want you to feel where your tongue is right now, right? Where's your tongue? Is it levitated between, like, is it holding in. In the middle or is your tongue actually down? Right? Is that. Mine is down. 80 of people, their tongue is down, right? So 20 of people, their tongue is actually like slightly elevated and in the middle, right? So if you watch, if you read a speech therapy textbook or you see online, right, A lot of people will say, oh, S sound is like alveolar sound, meaning the thing I just told you just that, right? Like they would. Sometimes the verbal cues would be like, oh, put your tongue up top and. And do the sm. And if you try that, it doesn't work, right? If you put it up top and go, it's. It's stuck. The tongue is in the way of the air. So, yeah, so Helena says, down to. Down to my gums, right? So that's the same as me. So 80% of people do that. So if you're teaching a child who is speech disorder, you would want to teach the easier and the majority of, like, what. What people do, right? Not. Not to try to. As people say nowadays, oh, you gotta embrace neurodiversity, whatever. Like, don't try to change how people talk. And. But. But that's my job, right? So at the end of the day, that should be the, the thing that you're. You need to teach your kid first if you're doing the sm. So it's always about placement first. Placement First. And you hear that in therapy, you hear there's like two things, one called manner of articulation and the other called place of articulation. So the place of articulation is where the articulators will go in a specific sound. For instance, for S, the tongue go down to the right under the lower upper teeth here. And then when you put your tongue, you dig your tongue into the gums, and then you close your teeth, do like an E, like that. And you go. And then you go. And that's the manner. The manner is how the sound is created, which is by friction. Right? So how do you do this is. You need to understand what the errors are. Now, I want to talk about that a little bit. And we talk about this in a lot more detail inside of the course, right? So what are the common errors? Number one is what we call stop. So if the S is stop, it becomes like a T or P or I haven't seen a K, right? But you know, like, I've seen kids who would say. For instance, the word say would be day, right? Becomes like T a Y or D a Y. That's a stop because you stop the S. The other kind of error that we get a lot is just omission. Like, it's gone, it's deleted. So instead of like, say, it would be A. And if the S is deleted, then that's something you have to treat as soon as they hit like, four, you know, because it's really. There's no rule. Like, it just affects the intelligibility. Meaning, like, it's very hard for someone to understand if they delete sounds. You know, it's better to substitute some sounds and then you can still guess because there are rules and stuff. But whereas if like, sounds are deleted, it's very hard for someone to really, like, understand. Okay, so what else? There's the. There's omission, there's stopping. There's also what we call. Last. Last week we talked a little bit about lateralization is where, like, the air comes out on the sides. So you know how it goes. The air is coming out from the middle. You go like. And then it sounds like crap, to be honest. So this kind of like s lateralization, it happens in adults, right? Some people say, oh, my kid has a lisp. Maybe that is a lateralization, right? So lisp is kind of like not really nicely defined, especially with, like, parents and teachers and so on. So we don't really call it lisp, right? We really don't. Usually we don't say that we either call that a lateralization or a dentalization, which is basically the tongue goes in between the teeth and goes like. Like that. And in some cases, culturally speaking, that is actually. That's actually acceptable for some reason. And if you know who Mr. T is, I talk about this. You know, the guy from Rocky 3, if you. If you know, like the movies from the 80s, that dude, or maybe even Mike Tyson, right? He talks with a dentalized. That's dentalized, meaning like dental, meaning like teeth, right? Dentalized. You go like that. So sometimes it's susceptible. And I think that's one of the easier ones to treat. And I've seen some kids, like even a kid at our church, he's got a dentalizer and he knows it, and he's like, oh, it's. It's a habit I can't break, right? So, like, to be honest, like, just articulation therapy, a lot of times, just breaking habits. So with. With this said, after dentalization, there's also one called palatalization or associations. So it's actually a backing of S. So you can hear. Sometimes you can hear the S becomes like more of a sh. So let's go back to the word. Say if they palletize that S, it becomes like a shot becoming a sha shay. Like, it kind of sounds like that, right? It's kind of sounds like you're speaking Mandarin as well. Like, if you know Chinese, then you would get what I mean. But at the same time, this is. This happens a lot when the kid cannot really differentiate the frequency of the. Between the S and a palletized S, right? So the tongue is like retracted behind, and therefore when the S comes out, it sounds bad. Okay, so pretty much those are the. The few S errors that I remember on top of my head, but that's pretty much it. I mean, like, this is my job as I. I kind of. I kind of know it by heart by now. But how do you teach it is basically you have to go down to, like, what. What we call isolation level first. So to make things easy for you to understand, it means just the S only. So before you teach the S words or whatever words you're like, whatever errors you're trying to teach, you always try to boil down to the easiest building blocks, no matter if it's language or speech. So in speech, that means just the consonant itself that your child is messing up. So if it's the S, you only want to do, like, that's the only sound you want to get, like 100% perfect first, before you go forward to other sounds. Whereas, you know, like, there are loads of different, how to say, like, methods to teach. Right. I. I still like the traditional method that a lot of people, like you learn, learn in textbooks. And like, if you go to therapy, you'd see it happen. And the reason is because it's very easy to teach you, the parents, and you can keep on doing it at home. Whereas, like, if you use, like, a lot of those approaches called, like, cycles approach or like natural linguistic whatever approach, like, those things are fancy and whatever. It probably works, but. But at the same time, it's not that easily transferable to you. Right? So traditional approach is to put the building blocks of the word, which is the individual sounds the easiest, which is the isolated sound first, and then move up the linguistic ladder from a consonant to a consonant vowel, and then to a consonant vowel, vowel. Like, for instance, if it goes, that's the isolation level, go up. CV would be sa. Go up. One more would be like putting two vowels, what we call diph long. And then that would be like, sigh, right? That's a real word. And then we could also go to, like, cbc, like constant vowel consonant, which may be sat sam on top of my head. That's all. And so I really think at the end of the day, you have to establish that isolation level first. And how do you do that? It really depends on the error. Okay. So for instance, if it's deletion, you need to establish some sort of airflow first because, you know, like, maybe they didn't register that there's some airflow coming out of the mouth when you do S. So usually what we do is, like, sometimes you see people trying to, like, do horns from talk tools, right. Or blow a whistle and so on, something like that. Or blow even a tissue. You try to, oh, there's air. Good. Now I want you to, like, you know, like, concentrate and go like a snake. Good. And then when you establish it, and then it's just you go up the ladder, right? You go, whatever. And then if it's stop, right? You need to understand why it stopped. So if it's a stop, then maybe they cannot really linguistically differentiate between S and a T. So you have to make sure you do something called minimal pairs first. Okay, this video is not about minimal pair, so I'm not gonna, like, go into what it is, but if you search online, then you will probably know what it is. Right? Minimal pairs. And then once you know that they can differentiate, and then you can think about, okay, how Come. Did they stop? Like, why did they stop? It's because their tongue went up. So you need to tell them the tongue go down first and then hiss. The sound app again. Usually this kind of verbal cue will help. Okay, what about lateralization? Lateralization is when the air goes, like, sideways, right? So what you want to do is to put the air in the middle. So how do you do that? Is by, like. Usually what I do is like, I use a straw. I don't have a straw here. So you'll have to do with your imagination. So you put a straw here in between the teeth. And then we teach the kid to blow. So when you blow, what happens is that the tongue creates, like, a small tunnel that is like. Like this right inside, and it leads the air in the middle. So if it's lateralized, why does. Why does the S lateralize? Is because the tongue is too forward. It slaps in front of the teeth, and then it forces the air on the sides and it goes like that if you try it, Right? So a lot of times, if your child gets like, the sounds incorrect, the first thing you should do is to imitate your kid to know why it's happening, right? To think yourself first. All right, so once you do that, what you want to do is to get the straw thinner and thinner, like, they can bite on it. And then once they do, like, the hiss, and you can hear there's a distinct sound when someone pushes air and hiss into a straw. It's like a weird whistling noise. And then when. When you, like, you just take it away. Then you have, you. You. You have established the isolation level, which is like that now. Like, remember the kid from church? He said, oh, this is like a hard habit to break for me. Not the song. Okay, I'm. I'm joking here. So if it's something like that, you have to do the S at isolation level many, many times until, you know, he or she has perfected it, and then you can move up the linguistic ladder. All right, so that's all I wanted to share tonight. Just until here. I guess that would be a little bit too much if I talk even more, but. Oh, and the last one is. Is the palletization of the S. Right? So, like, that's because the S is just. It's just the tongue is tongue based is too bad. By the way, guys, if you have any more questions, just leave them in the comments. Now I have around, like, a few more minutes for tonight, but as your tongue goes back, it sounds more and more like sh. So what you need to do is to plant that tongue right behind this. This front teeth. And how you do that is to. Usually what we do, I do is I put like a Cheerio. You know? What's a Cheerio? It's like one of those breakfast cereals that is like. It looks like a hoop. So I put it right here, right here. And then tell the kid to use the tip of the tongue to put it in place right on behind here. And once they put it there, they put them. Their teeth together, and then I instruct them to hiss. And most of the time, it works. All right. Most of the time it works. It becomes like that because you've had to establish the place of articulation. Right? All right, so any more questions from you guys, let me know right now. I'm just going to chill for a bit and then call it a night. Right. I guess there really isn't anyone who wants to ask a question. That's fine. So I'll see you guys next week. Hopefully I'm out of this place into a proper building, so to speak. And that's pretty much it, guys. I'm not going to show you where I am. It's kind of. It's kind of depressing. But just let me know if you have any more questions in the comment section. Right? That's all. So, Nana. Oh, you just. You just came late and watched? Oh, yeah, yeah, watch, do it. And then for your kid, I talk about using a straw. All right, so that's pretty much it, man. Let me know if you have any questions, Nana, Just put it in the comment section. I'll try to get back to you. All right, See you guys.