35 Years with a Lisp

I recently read this story on an Internet discussion group I participate in. It was told by Laura Sicola, a phonetician and pronunciation teacher at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA; and I thought I would share it with you.

I worked with a 35-year-old Korean businessman in a pronunciation class I was teaching. He had one of the strongest inter-dental lisps I have ever heard.

In providing feedback one day when we were working on dental fricatives (which, not surprisingly, he could do just fine), I mentioned the lisp, and clearly he didn't know what I was talking about. I explained simply, and he denied it, saying it was just his "poor English pronunciation." I suggested it was probably true even in his Korean and that he should ask his wife, which he did. The next day I asked what she had said and he replied:

"I said to her, do you hear something strange in my speech when I say 'Seoul' and other words with the /s/ sound? And she said, of course! So I asked her, when did you first find out? And she said, I noticed it the first time I met you. It makes you sound a bit like a child. So I said, why didn't you tell me? And she said, I thought you knew!"

He really wanted to know how to fix it, so we worked on it for an hour or so, and with diagrams and other strategies he was able to hear and produce /θ/ and /s/ very accurately. At the end, he summarized: "So, this word... (pointing to 'Seoul') should be pronounced [sol]. But I say [θol]. Is that right?" When I nodded, he closed his eyes, sighed, shook his head in disbelief and said, "I can't believe it... 35 years...!"

Maybe we phoneticians really can achieve something useful once in a while.