OT: Speech Therapy (was Re: Re: Slightly OT: French as a second language)

On 22 Nov, Josh Roth  wrote:
    (quoting an earlier post of mine)

> >    Try having the Yemmenite parents bring you their sons for speech
> >therapy because they (the kids) speak Hebrew like all the other Israelis
> >around them
> >and not like the rest of their family!
> >    Usually I try to talk them out of it, but one time I couldn't, and
> >I
> >ended up having to try and modify the poor kid's dialect to conform
> >to family standards!
>
> Did it work?? How old was he? He must have resisted.
    The kid was about 6 years old IIRC. He didn't (dare to) resist. (The
father
was a rather dominating character). Of course it didn't succeed! The kid
spent
all day in school, surrounded by standard Israeli Hebrew, not the Yemmenite
variety. Then he went home and played with the neighborhood kids, all of
whom
spoke standard Israeli Hebrew. If he watched TV or listened to music, it was
in standard Israeli Hebrew. He was in an overwhelmingly non-Yemmenite
environment. How was he to _need_ to aquire a Yemmenite accent? Parental
wishes alone are not enough!

>That's kind of cool in a
> way, that such things can happen in this world :-)
    "Ethnic"  therapy can indeed be cool! (I remember an Ethiopian
girl I treated last year. In order to practice her speech, she used to
describe
to me how to make all sorts of Ethiopian delicacies. (I should have taken
notes!)
    However, although teaching a person to change his/her accent is
an accepted part of a speech-language pathologist's mandate,
I usually relegate such cases to low priority.
There are too many other speech/language problems that can seriously
interfere with a person's ability to communicate or can seriously affect
their ability to succeed in school to worry about trying to replace a
perfectly
good phonological system with a different one. Vanity is not usually
a good enough reason for therapy.


Dan Sulani
--------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.