I often say to Pete, things like, "That singer has vocal fry. " or "Did you pick up on that lateral lisp?" And he usually just shakes his head with a sympathetic look on his face because I just can't help myself!
Tonight, I was driving the monkeys across town in a torrential downpour. I needed to be able to concentrate on the road and I needed to not hear, "Mom?!?" for a few cotton pickin minutes. So, I put Looney Tunes on for them in the van. I was sorry for my erroneous choice of media the instant Elmer Fudd opened his mouth. I was instantly distracted as I listened to him substitute "w" for "r". I imagined doing an oral motor evaluation on him to determine if he has weak jaw muscles. Yes, I am certain that he does. Maybe he needs to work on chewing exercises, three times a day to increase his jaw strength?I should get him some vinyl tubing to chew on. Then, Elmer reminded me to "Watch the woad, wabbit!"
Right after that, Tweetie Bird came on with his (or is it her?) amped up articulation disorder. Substitutions and distortions galore! And Sylvester with his slobbery lisp? Lip, tongue and cheek exercises and a case of tissues needed stat!
Poor Porky Pig with his dysfluency. I really feel for him. When I was in graduate school, I had a professor named, Dr. Ham (no relation to Porky) who assigned our class a dysfluency project. We had to pretend to be a person who stutters for a whole week. Wow! That was an eye opening and heart breaking experience.
There could actually be a whole speech and language disorders class built around the Looney Tunes characters. What a zany way for a budding speech therapy student to learn! Of course, with the plethora of problems those characters have, it could just make her go looney in the process.
Th...Th...Th...That's all folks...
Hugs,
Melissa
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