In order for me to reduce my heavily accented words with their often misplaced stresses and intonations, I have to “make myself” think something different. If I imagine that I am stuck in traffic and so I grow more and more irritated and to the point of speaking angrily, THEN I can say the word “people”.  This is one of my hardest words to say right now. You would say it PEE-pul.  I would say it PE-Pooo.

In otherwords, if I became a method actor and placed myself into a fake situation and really pretended, I can produce speech that is more normal. There are only two problems with this technique. Number one, I am not an angry person; and, number two, I absolutely hate lies. To me, this pretending is acting dishonestly and therefore a lie.  That is troublesome. I realize that I am not “really” lying, yet it really does feel like I am being dishonest, so it hinders me a bit. I have to then talk myself into acting in my head in order that the sounds might come out more acceptable to the expectations of my Midwestern United States of America audience.

I think of my vocal singing work over all these years. Music directors would tell us to do some alterations to our regular pronunciations so that the audience would better understand what we are singing. Here’s an example you might understand. Great is Thy faithfulness, oh God, our Father — would be sung: GrA Tiz thigh FAith foolness; oh gah—dour Fath-er.  Hopefully, some of you understand the concept.

In a similar way, I must now do a bunch of behind the scenes gymnastics with syllables of sounds to try to just speak without such a strong foreign accent. This week in one of the speech sessions I was to pronounce the two words “POOL” and “PULL”. However, when I pronounced them, they sounded pretty much the  same. The two speech therapist ladies tried to correct my pronunciation of the “u” in “pull”, but I could not hear the difference. I could mimic her, but not just catch and apply the proper sound of the vowel. Finally, it dawned on me that the vowel sound should be closer to the sound in the word “pole”. So I said the three words, “pool  — pull —- pole.” THEN, I got it.  The vowel sound in “pull” just feels slightly more toward the sound I make in the word “pole”. So I use this exercise to hear the tiny difference and make it easier to pronounce the word “pull”. A lot of work for one little word, huh?

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Though I had my initial analysis with the speech therapy department on May 20th, they had only the original neurologist’s diagnosis of “disarthria,” which is just an official word for “slurred speech”  often  caused by a neurological problem in mechanically producing the sounds. However, my speech is not really slurred as much as “accented”.

My therapist today said that we will focus on identifying which sounds I am getting wrong and then correcting those sounds. She told me that I seemed to be doing a fairly good job of “catching myself” producing the incorrect sounds. There are just so very many sound combinations that are not coming out properly in my everyday speech that it is a LOT of work.

One of the sounds that I know I have a great deal of trouble with is the “TH” sound.  The words “there or their”, “mother or father” are mispronounced as “Dar, mudder, and fadder.” That TH is a killer for me. When I try to slow down and really make my mouth form the sound it causes my tongue to tickle my lower teeth and lips together. It feels like when we used to make that kazoo sound by using a comb and a piece of paper OR when we took a very thick blade of grass held just-so in our cupped hands and blowing to produce that incredible buzzing sound like a kazoo.

Though I have spent the last two months working on putting the long A’s into words like table and baby. Now, the real work begins as I carry around a notebook and notate as many mispronounced words as I can. This phonetic journal should help me identify some of the biggest problems that I am having in accented speech. It is just that there are so very many accented words in my normal speech, that I get a bit discouraged as I wonder if  I’ll be able to work my way back to my regular voice.

I got excited when my speech therapist said that she had worked with a lot of people with foreign accents… I suddenly felt like this was something I was not so alone in. However, then she corrected my thinking. These foreign speakers were actually from that other country, not like me. Unlike the Japanese lady that my therapist was able to help with r’s and l’s; my dialect is not from any one language so we don’t have the typical pointers like if you are from Sweden then you have very strong UU’s or French has a very nasal and broad A. My accent is literally “all over the map”.

So. . . where to begin?  One word at a time. I remember two months ago when I first came out of the hospital I couldn’t say “yesterday,” without hitting hard brick walls between each syllable. Now, it is still somewhat slower that my old voice, but I have gotten that word to come out more naturally. One little victory with hopefully many more to come.

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