Speech training for children; the hygiene of speech

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Foreword

It is gratifying to note that those engaged in speech training for children are recognizing the great importance of not confining correctional efiforts solely to the speech mechanism. This little volume is an excellent example, which well illustrates this view of the problem. If the numbers of children who lisp and stammer are not to be augmented in future, all children must be properly trained in the development of speech. Unfortunately, most parents are little concerned with the general betterment of speech in their children aside from the riddance of its grossest defects; hence the general low standard of the speaking voice has become proverbial, specially in this country. In addition to giving precise and readily understandable methods for the speech training of children, the authors devote a large portion of their text to the important structural and functional principles that underlie its proper development,

vii

FOREWORD

The volume is doubly valuable because of its simplicity in presentation, and parents and governesses may easily avail themselves of the work — a fact of great importance, inasmuch as the development of good speech, as the authors contend, rightly begins at home during the first five years of life. The scientific soundness of the subject-matter combined with the practical experience that the authors have incorporated here cannot be too thoroughly commended. It is a very welcome and timely work.

L. Pierce Clark, M.D.

Vlll

Preface

After the many months of labor which precedes the writing of a preface it is a difficult task for an author to evaluate correctly his own work. It is with a degree of hesitancy, therefore, that we presume to point out those fields in which this book seems to us worthy of considertaion.

It was undertaken in order to meet the needs of progressive parents for a practical guide for their direction of the developing speech faculties, and the needs of teachers of the early grades who feel the injustice of condemning the child of few opportunities to so great a handicap as poor speech undoubtedly is. For while the child of the truly cultivated and trained parent may afford to stand or fall by what it has acquired in the home, the child who has not this advantage is condemned to advertise himself with each word as the product of less happy circumstances.

ix

PREFACE

We look forward to a time when, correctly nurtured in mind and body, the child will present himself at school age with undiminished possibilities for good speech. But this will indicate a degree of emotional adjustment not to be hoped for in many generations. In the meantime the teacher has it in her power to correct the faulty as well as encourage the healthy speech reactions.

It must be remembered that speech is the highest and most fundamental human attribute, that without it one is set outside the possibilities of constant communication with his fellows. No system of education is worth while which injures this faculty, or complete which ignores its preservation and encouragement.

It was necessary in arranging such a book to keep well in mind the behaviorest point of view and to attempt by emphasizing the predominating and most disturbing traits to present the types as they are seen in the home and schoolroom. The discussion of types is meant to be suggestive rather than inclusive and is pre-

PREFACE

sented with the hope that it may give impetus to a further study of such undoubted authorities as Doctors Adolph Meyer, G. Stanley Hall, L. Pierce Clarke, William White, Smith Ely Jellifife, Lewis M. Terman, and numerous others, whose names suggest themselves at once to the student of functional illnesses.

We take pleasure in giving credit to Miss Carrie Diebold, who undertook as part of her work in the University of Wisconsin to assist in the devising and trying out of the exercises, and to the many grade and special teachers whose kind and intelligent cooperation has made a thorough trial of the work possible. Our indebtedness is acknowledged with pleasure to those, also, who have come under our instruction at the universities of Wisconsin and Tulane, who by their constructive criticism and unfailing encouragement have given us insight into the abilities and needs of those whose task it will be to direct the work in the schools.

The Authors.

XI

CONTENTS PART I

PAGE

I The Speech Medium 3

II Speech Training ano General Education 10

The trial by voice: training and democracy: speech as a means of emotional expression: as a means of control: oral and visible speech: age and speech education: the present extent of training : the theory of reeducation : one essential.

III The Mechanisms of Speech ... 22

The original endowment : the learning process : the motor mechanism : the motive power ; the vocal apparatus: the articulating organs: the resonating chambers : the coordination of mechanism: the nervous mechanism of speech: the motor area : the preferential side : the respiratory center: the association area: the sense of kinaesthesia : the speech area : the coordinational area.

IV The Coordinations 47

Speech, a coordination of fundamental and accessory muscles: the accessory muscles: the fundamental muscles and kinaesthesia : rhythm xiii

Contents

PAGE

and its relation to speech; the accessory muscles and their misuse; in the home; in the schoolroom work; in the crafts.

V The Plastic Period 58

Part II

I The Beginning of School Life . . 167 Progress thus far: the parental attitude: discipline and tension : the need of speech : the voice and speech of the teacher: the speech teacher and the community.

II The Speech Class 179

Letter position: lip-reading: reading aloud: coarse muscles : fine muscles : inflection : tone : resonance : information.

Ill Program 204

Instructions for giving exercises : table-guide for kindergarten ; first and second grades : exercises for relaxation : vowel position : consonant position : coarse coordinations : fine coordinations: inflection: resonance: tone: pronunciation : information.

INDEX 257

XV

PART I

THE HYGIENE OF SPEECH

Chapter I The Speech Medium

THE history of orthophonies is brief. Like the profession of medicine it lay shrouded for centuries in occultism and quackery. A great many years after the practice of the other healing arts had been put on a scientific footing, the science of speech training and speech reeducation remained in the realm of mysticism. Any one with a good singing or speaking voice was considered by the general public to be equipped ipso facto to teach the science of how to sing or speak.

The reason for the persistence of this unscientific attitude is plain. There has been comparatively little research done by the medical man, the .physicist, or the psychologist, which is of value to the phonologist, and that which has been done is not easily accessible to the general public. The second reason is that the voice is so fundamentally bound up in the expression and the repression of the emotional life that it resents the intrusion of the scientific attitude.

It is essential that the craftsman know something of the material of which he builds. The goldsmith must know the composition of gold, must know its fusing point, how malleable it is, how much strain it will bear without bending and breaking, and, finally, what is pure and what alloy. He who would make the best design and execution must know, too, whence it comes and something of the history of its mining.

The worker in speech handles a finer medium. The study of the composition of speech is the study of the many reflex and voluntary activities of the human organism. The point at which speech becomes perfect is the point in

THE SPEECH MEDIUM

personal adjustment toward which the whole race has striven. For speech is a gage, though not of the number of vibrations to the second, however interesting it may be from that point of view ; it is no mere study in physics ; it is a test of the psychic adjustment of the individual person to the conditions under which he must live. It is the medium in which he presents himself to the trained listener and says: "Here am I. This is how I meet conditions. This is what I have developed, what breadth, what depth. Here are my aspirations, my unsleeping desires. This is what my environment has made of me, and I of it."

Even to-day in our busy search for methods time is not taken to go back and unearth and think out the fundamental causes of speech. The structure of speech work is still being built on a wobbly foundation, for less than any other manifestation of human adaptation, it can be considered separately. Our general educational endeavors have been directed too exclusively against the sensory or incoming end of

S the nervous arc. The training must be of the motor end as well. The training of speech thus becomes apparent as an essential part of the educational life, as vital as any study and paralleling in usefulness the opportunities for the acquiring of perspective and the practical lessons of adaptation taught on the playground Jand by class-room contact.

Familiarity has bred not contempt, but rather a complacent acceptance of the wonderful reflex equipment with which we are endowed. Speech is the capstone of the pyramid, and no working premise is worth while that is not based on a foundation of scientific study.

Hygiene of the emotions — that is, helping the child to acquire the correct values of the affairs of life — and practice in the expression of these emotions are the two fundamental fields of educational endeavor. With the introduction of speech hygiene and training there will come to the educators a comprehension of the foundations underlying the speech reaction and a better interpretation of it as an indicator of social conduct and a thermometer of the adap-

THE SPEECH MEDIUM

tation of the individual to his social surround- •ings.

. The value of corrective work can not be disputed. But if during the plastic period, in the pre-school, kindergarten, and first and second grades, training were given to set the correctly forming speech reactions and eliminate the faulty, the necessity for a large part of the individual corrective work could be obviated.

In arranging suitable training for the years from four to ten the prerequisite was to see the child and his need from his own point of view. It is obvious that to get smooth, easy coordinations his intellectual and emotional capacity must be considered, his attention held.

Children do not foresee the future. It ig only prolonged and repeated experience that gives the necessary perspective to make work for future reward possible. They work for the comfort or pleasure of the present. They cannot be expected to value a study that contains no immediate interest, and if a subject is not presented to them in such a way as to

THE SPEECH MEDIUM

hold the interest from task to task, the interest fixes itself on something else, and failure in that task is inevitable.

The work for speech must be so arranged that it not only holds the attention, but attains its end by indirection in order that the automatic functioning of speech may not be interfered with by what Huey has called "mouthconsciousness."

In fulfilling these demands it was necessary to select rhymes that could be repeated without efifort and yet were nbt familiar enough to be trite, for these latter the children say in a singsong way, which brings no results. Stories had to be written that obtained the maximum amount of vocal response from the child. Plays and games were used as a setting for exercises, some of which had been proven effective in speech work in colleges and universities, and some by teachers of physical education.

It has been our aim to be of practical aid to the progressive parent or teacher not only by putting before them in a suitable form the exercises that could be of value, but also by arranging the work in many related fields in such a condensed form as to make it accessible.

The fields of psychiatry and neurology, the coordinational activities, phonetics, pedagogy, anatomy, and physiology, psychology, and mental hygiene, all relate themselves to the problem of speech in a very direct way.

But whether we train through the sense of hearing, or of kinaesthesia, or through the will and the reason, speech is the highest expression of all^ educational and emotional attainment. The training for speech is the training for life.

Chapter II Speech Training And General Education

IT is one of the anomalies of the educational world that speech, the highest development within the possibilities of man, has been relatively ignored. Mary Thompson ^ says, "Among the many ways of estimating character, there is none more sure than that one which might be called the trial by voice."

Even to the untrained listener the voice is an infinitely expressive part of the personality. Without its being realized, social judgment is often based on nothing but the use of the voice.

Whether a child has acquired good or bad speech, has been left to the accident of association. (^Speech acquired during the first years of life can be thoroughly unlearned only with

1 Thompson, Mary, "Rhythmical Gymnastics." ID the greatest difficulty, although by an effort it may be much improved. Training for correct speech during the formative years would do more to break down social barriers and eliminate false ideas of class than would any other one field of endeavor. It would remove the handicap under which too many capable people labor. Even grammar does not play so inexorable a role./ This is often obvious in the deliberate use of slang and poor English by people who are socially acceptable. It is often observed that poorly constructed English and faulty pronunciation do not conceal true culture; whereas, poor tone, inflection, and certain usages of the voice inevitably disclose a lack of breeding./ In a democratic nation, therefore, our present neglect of speech training becomes almost anti-social. It is a remnant of autocracy whereby we say that the child has only a right to that which it inherits.

Speech was developed in response to the emotional needs and their realizations. Since it is through speech mainly that the emotions are expressed, the control of the emotions

II through the control of the voice is a fundamental attainment, but this process has become automatic and thus has lost a value that it would have, could it be made at once available for deliberate use. Training in the expression of the emotions is of value because the child must learn to do with deliberate intent what it cannot do impulsively. It must not only be taught that a snarl is ugly and impolite, but also how to replace the ugly, animal-like sound with a pleasant one that will stimulate its attendant emotion.

The truth cannot always be told of our emotions, no matter how much value the emotion may have. It is obviously not an act of kindness to shiver with the cold or some receptive person, who otherwise would have felt warm, may also begin shivering. The expression of nausea in public is utterly taboo, although its primitive value is untold. We may not even use in speech those "vomitive sounds" which the young baby is said to have and which are indicated in the primitive alphabet. The fundamental necessity of speech and expression thus becomes identified with good breeding and even human lovableness. The physical assumption of the expression of an emotion will often produce the emotion. Even a forced smile stimulates the correct internal! secretions, as enforced sadness will stimulate! tears, and in response to the internal secretionsj happiness or real sadness will result to a certain' extent. Putting on a brave attitude in the f ac^ of disaster has led many to meet even martyr^ dom with joy.

Speech is a reaction to the environment as surely as the withdrawal of the hand from a hot stove and must te adequate not only to the individual but also to the social needs, else the individual must sufifer. It is, indeed, a thermometer of the emotional reactions, and the emotional reactions prove to be a compilation of many little habit reactions. To reeducate the incorrect reactions as they show themselves in speech is to do what our educational systems have aimed to do since the world began. No system that hopes to cover the field of education can ignore speech.

"Language," says Terman, "is the main vehicle of mental progress." It is the main vehicle of the acquiring of perspective, because through it we learn the experience of others. The information that makes education possible is given in the medium of speech or of the pictured speech, that which we call writing and print. Even the great virtue of this visible speech, its permanence, does not give it more importance than the value of the immediate speech.

Why, then, has it acquired in our schools an emphasis relatively much greater? Because spoken language is so vital to the perpetuation of the race that it must, of necessity, be developed in the very first years of life. Writing and reading can so easily be put off indefinitely that it is necessary to over-emphasize their value in order to make the arduous task of learning at all acceptable.

John Arrowsmith says : "A child's natural method of thought-expression is by speech, which should be full, direct, simple and copious. . . . Reading and writing, the modern method of thought communication, has been stressed too early in the life of the child." ^ It would be against all the teachings of musical pedagogy to permit the child to learn to play the violin, yet to wait for him to attain adulthood before he is taught the correct position of the bow. How much more absurd to wait until the child has obtained speech by imitation before he is trained in its essentials, for he is then self-taught in his most vital activity.

The most vitally important years for the training of speech are the first five years of life, during the period in which the child is normally acquiring it.

In the period from five to nine the habits are being set in the mechanism, the formation ofj speech is still in progress but the process is no yet complete. Training, then, is still fraught' with the possibilities of good results and, fori the same reason, with greater danger if unwisely and ignorantly undertaken.

From ning jto fourteen, is a period of read-

1 "Possible Lines of School Refonii," in "Child-Study," December, 1917, Vol. 4.

IS justment, of marked growth and abnormal balance of the different functions and activities, and is, therefore, a period of great psychic danger to the individual. Speech correction here becomes relatively a more delicate process and a more difficult one, as the habits are beginning to be deeply graven.

From fifteen to twentv is what has been called thejast periad..xi,.^;acej^ but muscular and nerve habits retained until this time are as much more difficult of eradication as is the straightening of a bone.

Since groSvth ceases only with death, even the adult is not hopeless of modification, but the effort required is so much greater, the will must be so much stronger, the habits of character must be so much more auspicious , before good can be accomplished, that by comparison he is relatively uneducable. However by persistent effort and a thorough determination even the most handicapped adult can make of the voice an instrument very nearly adequate to his emotional needs.

The training, or rather the lack of training, i6 which is given to the speech faculty during the first years of life, need hardly be pointed out. With the exception of teaching the baby the first words "bye, bye," "mama," and "papa," "baby," and a few others, there is none given. The child hears, retains, and repeats the words of our vocabulary and in this manner attains language.

What he does get in the home is a great deal of speech suppression. "Do not talk so loud," and "do not talk so much," are perhaps the adrnonitions which he hears most. His obedience to the first command, with regard to degree, depends on his coordinational ability, and in the first years this ability is very poorly developed. Loudness and softness is a matter of delicate adjustment and can only be attained automatically after years of training. To be sure, the child does often talk loudly or softly as directed, but the voluntary control of the degree of loudness is an ability developed much before its automatic control. The child's normal method of expressing intense emotions is with an over-adequate amount of voice. In order that this automatic control may develop, it is, of course, necessary that the voluntary control be exercised frequently. No objection can be made to corrections given at the right time, and that is whenjjneJajalone-jadthjthe child and when the corrections are made with this end in view, TheyjnustJiat_be-giv€-n-too frequently,

"Do not talk so much," is obviously for the benefit of the elders. It would not be recommended that any child be permitted to talk to the exclusion of adults. Since adults must live with children and since children must adapt themselves to the world, it is excellent training that they learn to adjust themselves in this respect as well as others. They should not, of course, be permitted to monopolize the conversation when there are guests present, but the adult should take care that he is not taking advantage of his position of authority to keep the child from talking simply because he himself wishes to talk.

That "children should be seen and not heard," is pernidous doctrine. No child can

i8 learn to speak who abides by it. The processes of speech are composed just as definitely of motor output as of nerve intake, and no child is justified in obeying the command. This is true in school as much as in the home.

The teacher, as does the parent, deals in degrees and takes advantage of her position to enforce a quiet that is not advisable. Specially is this true in the first two grades of school.

Too much emphasis is put in the class on the correction of pronunciation and grammatical construction. In the early years of life these are relatively unimportant faults, because example and the criticism of associates will correct them to a greater extent in the years between nine and fifteen. Joseph H. Choate, a man of acknowledged breadth and insight into social needs, said that "the whole matter of pronunciation is of relatively small practical importance in most cases."

Teachers of physical education have emphasized the fact that a few moments daily of a corrective exercise will offset the incorrect use of the muscles even when the incorrect use is for the rest of the twenty- four hours. A coal-heaver who will over-correct the use of his muscles for five minutes daily may regain the straightness of his back. Even when speech is incorrectly used for the greater part of the day, fifteen minutes' daily drill will not only train the sense of hearing, but will stimulate the forming of correct habits and will also slowly overcome the incorrectly formed habits. Normal speech corresponds to the straight back ; abnormal, to the deformed back of the coal-heaver.

The emphasis placed on dressing the drill for speech as attractively as possible is based on the fact that boredom makes atonic the general muscular use of the body, and that lack of interest soon ceases to be a negative state and becomes an active condition of dislike; hence restriction of the vocal apparatus follows. The sloughing off of our own personality, which takes part in reading rhymes as well as in playing games and in reading or acting stories, reduces the element of timidity and self-consciousness and, therefore, of strain.

Interest and direct work for letter position 20 are mutually exclusive with the young, and the latter, except where it is undertaken to correct abnormal conditions of malformation and mechanical lisping, is apt to make conscious a process which should rightly he automatic. This automatism rightly extends to the breathing apparatus as well, and the exercises for this function must be put into a form that attracts in itself and distracts from the object of the work. In adults, where the vital coordinations are set and a great deal of change cannot be accomplished for evil, direct control may be used, but is not necessarily preferable. Working by indirection may be said to be the fundamental rock on which speech training for children is built.

Chapter III The Mechanisms Of Speech The Original Endowment

AT birth the human infant has stored in his nervous system the patterns of certain primitive expressions that have been of service in the preservation of the race. These are limited, and express what may be assumed to be displeasure and its opposite, a more or less negative state, contentment or acceptance. The former is shown by cries and movements of a variable nature, the latter by quiet or by slightly accelerated breathing, accompanied by some movement of the limbs and trunk. Similar endowments are the possession of nearly all of the animal kingdom. The endowment that sets the human apart from the other animals is the possibility of the large, very nearly limitless, vocabulary of sounds that we call vowels and consonants.

This ability would not develop were it unaccompanied by the opportunity to hear spoken language, as is demonstrated in the totally deaf, who must be given speech artificially; for speech, as we know it, does not "come by nature." It is a selective and adaptive process, during which the child chooses from the tremendous vocabulary of sounds and unlimited range of expression those which will be understood by the people with whom it is surrounded as representing certain ideas and emotions.

Thus the child must select from the phonic reactions at his command the one adequate to the situation ; that is, he must express his emotions with the accepted tone and inflection and pitch, and, by thus relearning in the kinaesthetic sense this appropriate physical speech reaction, crystallize and relearn the emotion to which he is giving expression. By giving motor expression to the primitive feeling tone back of speech, the paths, figuratively speaking, along which the feeling tpvels are deepened and completed.

THE MOTOR MECHANISM

The mechanism necessary to accomplish this is elaborate and complicated. It is composed of hundreds of parts controlled by nerves, whi^h are directed from a special area in the brain, called the area of speech. For purposes of description the mechanism may be divided into two parts; first, the muscles, bones, and other integuments that make up the chest, larynx, mouth, and head, all of which are used in the production of voice and articulate speech ; and, second, the speech area of the brain and the nerves that convey to the muscles the impulses that originate in the brain.

THE MOTIVE POWER

From a physiological point of view, the first part of the mechanism, composed of muscles, bones and integuments, may be further divided into four distinct parts ; first, the motive power, composed of the diaphragm, ribs, inter-rib muscles, which together make up the thorax or chest, and the enclosed lungs, and the windpipe leading from the lungs to the vocal band.

There are twelve pairs of ribs, which are joined together at the back with the bones of the spine. The first ten pairs of ribs slant downward and forward as they run around the body. The first seven ribs are fastened to the breast-bone by a piece of cartilage, thus giving great flexibility ; the rest of the rib is of bone. The eighth, ninth, and tenth ribs are fastened to the seventh rib. The upper ribs, especially in the male, are not easily moved, as there rests upon them the breast muscles and fat. Hence, it can be seen they would not be so flexible as the lower five ribs.

The breathing apparatus consists of an airtight box called the thorax, the sides of which are composed of ribs. Between the ribs are muscles which are covered with fat and skin in such a way that no air can gain entrance through the walls. At the bottom of the thorax is a fanshaped muscle, domed upward into the chest. This muscle is called the diaphragm. Inside the thorax and resting with their lower part against the diaphragm, are the lungs. Into the lungs run the bronchi, which, joined, form the trachea, or windpipe, and convey the air to and from the lungs.

The act of breathing is carried out by the coordination of more than two score muscles, the twelve pairs of internal and external rib muscles, twenty-four on each side, the neck muscles, the chest muscles, the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles.

The mechanism of their use is as follows: the upper rib being fixed by the neck muscles, the inner rib muscles contract and the ribs are rotated outward and at the same time the front ends are lifted, thus pushing the breastbone away from the backbone, and increasing the space in the thorax.

The main muscle, however, used in the expansion of the chest cavity is the diaphragm. It is a thin, powerful muscle, domed upward so that it projects into the cavity of the chest. When this muscle contracts, its fibers are shortened and it becomes less domed, becomes almost flat. This increases enormously the capacity of the chest.

The abdominal muscles play an important part in the act of breathing. When the diaphragm contracts, it forces the abdominal organs, just below it, out of place and they, in turn, force out the abdominal walls. It is the resilience of these muscles, acting through the abdominal organs, which helps to force the diaphragm back into place. Thus there is added to the resilience of the diaphragm the elastic force of the abdominal muscular wall to aid in forcing the air from the lungs. In times of stress, as in screaming or making a sudden, loud, violent noise, the abdominal wall actively contracts and helps force the diaphragm upward.