For English, "S" marks the spot!
Dear Fellow Earthlings,
Some five weeks ago, a 17-year-old man showed up at our Ginza headquarters. He had come to see us on the recommendation of his mother, who had been a Jingles client some 10 years back.
His (and his mother's) main concern was his lisp. The young man (Let's call him Hiroto.) explained that -- when he spoke either English or Japanese -- he had a lisp. Adding to his unease was the fact that he was scheduled to fly out on August 12th of this year and begin his freshman year at a university in the state of Indiana in the United States.
I have dealt with hundreds of situations in which people have had lisps -- and in all cases (so long as the clients did not stop Jingles training before treatment was completed), have not merely improved, but have ELIMINATED ENTIRELY the physical (and psychological) factors that form the basis for those lisps.
Within 5 minutes of the commencement of the evaluation of Hiroto's lisping (in both Japanese and English) I saw that clearing up the young man's problem would be a cinch.
Jingles theory and the utilization of speech motor skills based on it saw to it that my evaluation of Hiroto's situation was accurate. By looking at the fine "friction lines" of Hiroto's tongue, I soon had him moving headlong into a training regimen that would guarantee maximum results for eliminating both his English -- AND his Japanese -- lisps.
The fact that Hiroto was energetic, intelligent, and fairly bursting with excellent speech motor skills acquisition potential sped things along.
When Hiroto walked out of our Jingles headquarters on Friday, August 9th, his lisping had become a thing of the past!
You see, for English, S is the "primary synergy support gesture" ("PSSG"). By the way, the Japanese PSSG is the vowel "a". Due to Hiroto's upbringing as a native speaker of Japanese, his "a" governs his other Japanese sounds. Hiroto's lisp probably developed due to the fact that although he grew up in Japan, he mostly attended schools where English was the language of instruction.
But why, then, did that create a lisp in Japanese? It was a "reverse compensation" that Hiroto made when he subconsciously compared English and Japanese. As a 7- or 8-year-old, his pre-adolescent brain cued him in on the fact that the Japanese "s" and English "S" are not the same. He dealt with this by bringing his English "S" up from his abdomen, while forming his Japanese "s" up only from his upper vocal tract. The resultant lisping was his way of "dampening" the Japanese "s" when he spoke Japanese so as to make it distinct from his "S" of English.
However, outside of school, Japanese was his main language, so his English "S" experienced arrested development because it was not used sufficiently -- or when it was, was used with many people whose native language was NOT English, even though their language of instruction was!
But all of these factors are now things of the past.
We now have a young man headed for America with an S that actually constitutes his most fully developed English gesture. With this valuable improvement to his English allophonome, Hiroto should experience spontaneous improvement in all of his other English gestures as he pursues his university studies in the United States.
Steve Walker
Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.