According to rhetoric, clarity of speech is important not only for public speaking, but also for everyday communication, work, and learning. If a person or child has poor diction, they have difficulty speaking with others. Slurred speech makes it difficult for listeners to understand information, so it is very important to pronounce words correctly and clearly. This will make life much easier and lead to success in work and study. Diction training helps develop sound pronunciation. It includes a set of measures that improve the condition of the organs of articulation and improve the quality of sound pronunciation.
What is speech diction?
Diction is the clear pronunciation of sounds and words. Clear and beautiful speech has a positive effect on the perception of the person who has it. Therefore, not only the announcer of central television, but each of us must have clear and intelligible diction.
If you want not just to speak, but to make sure that your interlocutors understand you, you need to work on your diction. Especially if she needs it.
What does diction consist of:
Clear articulation (Correct and clear pronunciation of sounds). It is thanks to clear articulation that the speaker’s speech is legible and his interlocutors easily understand what he wants to convey. Violation of this indicator of diction may occur due to the physiological characteristics of a person. You can improve the clarity of pronunciation of sounds by training your tongue and lip muscles.
Correct articulation (Coordinated movement of the muscles of the articulatory apparatus). Malocclusions, frenulums, etc. have a negative effect on articulation. With such physiological deviations, burr and nasal sound may appear.
Timbre . Often, the manner of pronunciation is influenced by a person’s temperament. The speaker may tend to monotony or speed up his speech. Often it is haste that occurs in people with poor diction. But, as practice shows, almost anyone can “defeat” this problem.
Intonation . As for intonation, it is formed primarily from the ability to clearly pronounce vowel sounds and stress. You can set intonation with the help of some breathing exercises and reading aloud. Improving intonation is very difficult and painstaking work.
Noise reduction in our lives
Noise reduction techniques are used to clear audio of unnecessary audio events for subsequent replay. When editing films, music, podcasts and other media, you often need to get rid of unnecessary sound events. Such tasks may also require a general improvement in recording quality. This involves not only removing noise, but also modifying the signal, which can improve the perception of recorded speech. Similar tools are usually available in audio editors and mixing programs for creating tracks. For example, one of the most famous audio editors, Audacity, uses an approach called “noise gate”, or rather, a specific spectral variety of them, used after a fast Fourier transform (FFT). In addition, Audacity has window mechanisms for smoothing the signal and removing its small artifacts. Audacity's noise reduction tools are particularly well suited for restoring microcassette recordings [1].
A popular and challenging task is on-the-fly noise reduction—noise reduction and playback at the same time as speech recording. The pursued goal is to mask sounds that are not related to the information spoken by a person and interfere with its perception. Most often, such noise reduction is used for audio conferencing in Skype, Zoom, Discord, etc. On-the-fly noise reduction usually uses the same principles of “noise gates,” but in addition, machine learning methods are used to clean the signal on the fly. For example, Microsoft, based on the results of the DNS-Challenge competition [2], adapted the best solutions for its Skype and Teams developments. These solutions are based on recurrent neural networks with LSTM blocks and convolutional neural networks [3, 4]. As a result, the latest versions of Skype and Teams are able to broadcast clear voice in real time in the presence of aggressive noise: a drill, a fan or wind.
A third interesting area of use for noise reduction methods is preprocessing and cleaning the audio signal before applying automatic speech recognition methods so that the result is generated correctly. There are many pitfalls in this area, since the signal should not contain artificial speech artifacts, otherwise such “cleaning” can worsen the result. For example, this work clarifies that mask-based noise reduction systems are not able to improve the result of speech recognition and only worsen the metrics due to the unnatural spectral characteristics of the final signal. On the other hand, signal improvement algorithms based on deep neural networks showed good results when preprocessing in a speech recognition pipeline.
Is it necessary to read aloud to develop diction?
Reading aloud
Every speech therapist will tell you that one of the best exercises for diction is reading aloud. At the same time, what is important is not the number of words read, but the articulation and clarity of pronunciation of sounds.
When using this technique, do not forget that reading has other useful qualities. A pleasant “bonus” of this technique for improving diction will be an increase in vocabulary, improved imagination, and memory development.
Many people love to read, but their diction leaves much to be desired. That is why you need to read it out loud. Try to pronounce the letters and words written in books clearly and with expression, and paint your speech with emotional colors.
Regular reading aloud will help get rid of tongue-tied speech, slips of the tongue, hesitations and other things that negatively affect diction.
Since the text of books, especially in classical literature, is very different from the way we speak in everyday life, it will help you not only express yourself beautifully, but also shape your speech according to the literary language.
When reading aloud, do not rush. Sit in a comfortable chair and grab a book. It is advisable that this be one of your favorite books. Of course, militants or Russian “detectives” are not suitable for such practice. Difficult scientific literature too.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy has a very beautiful style. But his main work, War and Peace, contains too much French. Therefore, this work will not suit you. Practice on his earlier stories.
Soviet science fiction is very good for reading aloud. Especially the works of the Strugatsky brothers. Unfortunately, their modern followers have simplified the genre too much and are unlikely to be suitable for reading aloud.
Read the chosen work expressively, marking the emphasis and making the necessary pauses. If we return to the Strugatskys, then listen to the audio books of these authors, recorded by Vladimir Levashov. Take his diction as a standard and try to repeat it.
You can take it a step further and add a little artistry to your read-aloud. Try to imagine the characters of the work, their appearance and character. Then add individual notes to their remarks. But, of course, you shouldn’t forget about the most important thing – diction training. There is no need to overdo it with artistry.
Once you become confident in reading aloud, you can increase your reading speed a little. But it is important to pronounce sounds and words clearly and distinctly. As you increase your reading speed, you must avoid monotony and excessive acceleration. Even if on the next page of the book you find out the outcome of the event.
For reading aloud to be effective, it is important to read for at least 30 minutes a day. And within a month you will be able to achieve noticeable success. And in order to be absolutely sure that your diction is progressing, record on a voice recorder how you started reading aloud and how you read after some time of such regular training.
Noise classification
There are many different classifications of noise, for example, by the nature of the spectrum or by wave frequency. However, when we want to get rid of noise in a speech recording, we should first take into account the categorization of noise according to temporal characteristics:
As you may have noticed, the temporal characteristics of noise are closely related to the method of noise generation: stationary and oscillating noise, as a rule, are formed by some kind of constant processes (natural or artificial), while intermittent and pulsed noise are formed by sudden one-time processes. For simplicity, intermittent noise can be thought of as impulse noise that repeats at some intervals.
Noise categories are given in order to differentiate noise by the difficulty of suppressing it. The complexity of the noise reduction task lies in the unpredictability of noise that can occur in the audio signal. We can remove noise from a signal with relative ease if we know in advance what kind of noise is in that signal and where. In addition, it is quite easy for us to get rid of stationary noise, because we can easily determine the loudness threshold in the spectrum, since the white noise will be evenly distributed throughout the signal, and in fragments of silence we will clearly observe the amplitudes of the noise. You can build the following pyramid of task complexity:
While problems at the top of the pyramid can be solved using computational methods, problems at the bottom of the pyramid can only be solved using machine learning methods. If computational methods solve the problem of ridding a signal of certain noise, then neural network methods are trained to solve the problem of selecting only relevant speech information from the entire audio stream.
Let's now take a closer look at both traditional and advanced methods of noise reduction in audio.
How to improve diction for an adult or a teenager?
The King speaks!
WALNUTS . A good way to improve your diction is to use walnuts for this. They need to be placed behind the cheek (one on each side) and the tongue twister must be spoken for several minutes. After which you need to remove the nuts and say the same tongue twister again.
PENCIL IN YOUR TEETH . Hold a pencil between your teeth and read a poem from memory with expression.
IMPORTANT: Both methods can be used by both children and adults. With their regular use, you can improve your diction and make your speech more relaxed and free. This technique can be used even in cases of speech impairment due to a stroke.
RECORDING ON A DICTAPHONE . This technique can be combined with reading aloud, which we described above. Turn on the recorder before you start reading aloud and record a fragment of any text you read. Then you need to listen to the recording and mark the sounds that you pronounce incorrectly. When you read books aloud later, try to pay special attention to problematic sounds.
TONGUE TWISTERS . Perhaps the most famous way to improve your diction is tongue twisters. Repeat these rhythmic phrases daily. Pay special attention to the pronunciation of problematic sounds. If your diction suffers from incorrectly pronounced hissing or whistling sounds, then you can solve this problem with the help of a tongue twister:
ARTICULATIVE GYMNASTICS . There are a lot of exercises to improve diction, which are included in the concept of articulatory gymnastics. With their help, you can significantly improve the pronunciation of an adult. We will talk about them in the section “Exercises for diction and articulation.”
BREATHING EXERCISES . Many people underestimate proper posture and breathing when communicating with other people. But without this it is impossible to have correct diction. Entire courses in the study of acting are devoted to correct inhalation and exhalation. And if you want to speak like Andrei Mironov or Vasily Livanov, then be sure to devote a few minutes a day to breathing training.
- Stand straight, place your hands on your waist and your feet shoulder-width apart
- Inhale slowly through slightly parted lips
- Then try also inhaling air while reading the text out loud
- Then make the task even more difficult: move around the room, take a breath and speak
- As you exhale, rise up and stretch the letter “mm-mm”
Exercises for formulating thoughts
A number of ways to help you understand how to correctly express your thoughts:
- Speak in public more often. Take advantage of every opportunity to make a presentation at meetings and gatherings. Of course, you should prepare in advance.
- First try to express your thoughts in writing. Before you send an email, you should skim through it, analyzing the organic nature of the sentences.
- Listen to good speakers, read quality books. There can be both business books and fiction books. The benefits of reading are known to be underestimated. This will help expand your vocabulary and introduce new colloquial structures into your speech.
- Develop your brain. This means eating right, exercising, and solving intellectual problems.
- Study the techniques of oratory and rhetoric. Books by D. Carnegie would be good works to implement this idea.
- Make sure that communication does not become talkative. Verbosity is the inability to express one's thoughts.
- Take an active part in discussions and meetings. This will help you learn to defend your position.
- Before the performance, record yourself on a voice recorder.
- A person’s environment plays a special role. Therefore, to make your speech more diverse, you should communicate with people who have a rich vocabulary.
- Write a summary of the speech. Having a structured speech plan before going out in public is a business-like approach to business.
- Do not use too sophisticated words and complex sentences. The simpler and more interesting the speech, the more people will understand it.
Developing the habit of speaking competently is not always easy, so you will have to work hard. However, it should be remembered that in the end you can significantly increase your vocabulary, be able to express all your thoughts out loud without embarrassment, and improve your spoken language by introducing new words into it.
Warm-up for diction
Pencil in teeth is a great exercise for diction
Before public speaking, it is imperative to warm up your diction. To do this, you can use the methods described above. For example, take a pencil between your teeth and read a few tongue twisters. After which you need to say the same thing without a pencil.
Try saying complex words from the text you want to convey to your audience several times. Read your favorite poem from memory. A few minutes of this warm-up will be enough to stretch your vocal cords, facial muscles and prepare yourself for the performance.
You can also stretch your diction using the following exercises:
| Stick it out and hide it | We push the tongue forward as far as possible, then hide it back. We move our tongue forward and then back. Exercise duration: 2-4 minutes |
| Poking cheeks with tongue | We begin to prick our cheeks with our tongue one by one. First we prick the left cheek, then the right. Exercise duration 3-5 minutes |
| "Teeth cleaning" | Rotate your tongue in a circle in your mouth. The mouth must be closed. We do 15-20 rotations clockwise and vice versa |
| Circular movements | We stretch out the tongue and twist it in a circle. We make 10-15 circles clockwise, then counterclockwise |
| "Tube - smile" | We stretch our lips forward, after 3 seconds you begin to smile as widely as possible. First the lips forward, then back. We do this exercise for at least 3 minutes. |
| "Bubble" | First we inflate one cheek, then the other. Duration 2 minutes |
Working on speaking skills
How to improve your speech diction quickly? To achieve results, you will need to work on your speaking skills.
The recommendations will be as follows:
- The voice should not be monotonous. To improve your speech and diction, you need to learn to speak emotionally. It is necessary to master the ability to change tonality. This will help the other person understand whether you are asking a question or asserting something.
- Contents of the conversation. Learn new words to enrich your vocabulary. This way you can improve your speech and diversify it. It is advisable to avoid tautologies and frequent repetition of the same words.
- Words with unknown meaning. If you don't know the meaning, it's better not to use it in conversation.
- Try to get rid of parasitic words.
The tips are very simple, but significantly improve your speaking skills.
Working on diction and pronunciation
Oratorical talent is extremely rare. Almost all famous people intensively prepare for every public appearance. It is known that Cicero could not utter a single word without preparation. And he is still held up as an example as a great rhetorician.
There are many exercises with which your speech can become clear and beautiful. There are both universal exercises and those that are designed to help correct a specific problem. For example, a whistling “S”, an indistinct “L” or a violation in the pronunciation of the sound “R”. In order to solve these problems you will have to work.
Speech development techniques
If you want to find out how to develop your child’s speech skills, then use special literature. Experts recommend publications by the following authors:
- A. M. Borodich. The author touches on the issues of improving speech skills among preschoolers. The main attention is focused on the formation of coherent speech.
- E. V. Kolesnikova. The program includes teaching materials for teachers and working materials for children of different ages. It includes illustrations, games and various fun exercises. In addition to tasks aimed at developing speech skills, the program contains tasks aimed at preparing the hand for writing. The material is very extensive - poems, tongue twisters, songs, fairy tales, books and so on. The teacher does not have to look for anything himself.
- O. S. Ushakova and E. M. Strunina. The program is designed for teachers and adults who want to independently develop their child’s speech before school. It includes many games and tasks aimed at comprehensive stimulation of speech - sound, grammatical and lexical.
There are many techniques written by various authors. A speech therapist will help you choose a specific one, based on the level of speech development of your child.
If you are faced with problems of delayed speech development, then it is better to contact the NEAPL speech therapy and psychology center. Self-diagnosis and self-medication cannot be practiced. Speech problems do not go away on their own. Only an effective correction program will allow the child to speak on par with his peers.
Exercises for diction and voice
Diction
When speaking in public or during normal conversation, we use the muscles of the tongue and throat. It is logical that in order to speak beautifully, you need to “pump up” these muscles. But, unlike the biceps and pectoral muscles, we do not need sports equipment.
1. You can pump up the muscles involved in producing sounds by regularly pronouncing “A-E-O” . At the same time, it is important to try not to open your mouth too much. The effect can be achieved by pronouncing sounds as deep as possible in the oral cavity.
2.A very good effect can be achieved in diction and by training your lips. To do this you need to say:
- “GL” , “VL” , “VN” - for the upper lip
- “KS” , “GZ” , “VZ” , “BZ” - for the lower lip
3. You can also shape your tongue into a shovel and say “I” and “E” several times. Now let’s give the tongue the shape of a hook and simultaneously pronounce “O” and “U” .
4. We continue to “pump up” the muscles of the tongue. We close our mouth and, using internal movements of the palate, cheeks and lips, make the sound “M” .
By performing these diction exercises, you can feel the results after just a few regular sessions.
If a child at 2-2.5 years old does not speak at all or says few words, this usually causes concern for parents, and they consult a doctor.
Well, what if the child speaks a lot, but poorly? It is not uncommon for a 3-4 year old child to speak so indistinctly that only his mother can understand him. It happens that at this age children do not pronounce certain sounds, replace some sounds with others, or their rhythm and tempo of speech is disturbed - they speak chokingly, very quickly or, conversely, draw out words, etc. Such violations, as a rule, are of little concern parents, and they tend to explain it by saying that “small children are generally difficult to understand!”
Of course, in the early stages of speech development, the articulation of sounds in all children is imperfect: they distort, omit or replace many sounds. However, this can be considered the “norm” for children no older than 2.5-3 years. If articulation defects are observed in older children and persist, measures must be taken to eliminate them. When these defects are very pronounced in young children, it is necessary to pay attention to them - whether they are associated with some kind of disorder.
Currently, speech disorders have been studied quite well, and many of them can be successfully treated. For a wide range of parents, detailed knowledge of this area is unlikely to be necessary, but a general understanding of it is likely to be useful. Parents, for example, should know what constitutes a deviation from the correct development of speech, which refers to speech disorders. This will help them contact a speech disorder specialist in time, and the defect can be corrected sooner. Remember: the more persistent a speech disorder has become, the more difficult it is to treat.
There are four main groups of speech disorders:
1. Violations of sound pronunciation. 2. Violations of the rhythm and tempo of speech. 3. Speech disorders associated with hearing impairment. 4. Underdevelopment of speech or loss of previously existing speech.
Sound pronunciation disorders.
Sound pronunciation disorders include tongue-tiedness (also called dyslalia) and dysarthria - slurred speech.
Tongue-tiedness is expressed in the absence of some sounds (the child misses them in words), in the distortion of sounds (the child pronounces them incorrectly) and in the replacement of one sound with another.
Tongue-tiedness can be functional or mechanical. With functional tongue-tiedness, hearing and the structure of the articulatory apparatus are normal, and the causes of speech disorders lie in the weakness of the nervous processes occurring in the brain. The mechanical form of tongue-tiedness is caused by congenital abnormalities in the structure of the oral and nasal cavities (lips, teeth, palate, nasal passages, etc.). With these lesions, not only the pronunciation of sounds suffers, but very often there are also disturbances in voice timbre, speech rhythm, etc.
Functional tongue-tiedness (omission, distortion, replacement of sounds) in the second or third year of a child’s life can be considered a natural phenomenon. There is even a term: “physiological dyslalia.” If the pronunciation defect persists even at an older age, then you need to contact a speech therapist.
The most defects are observed in the pronunciation of sounds that have a difficult method of articulation. Moreover, the more complex the articulation of sound, the more defects there will be. More often than others, defects occur in the pronunciation of the sounds “r” and “l” (the so-called lingual sounds), somewhat less often - in the pronunciation of the sounds “s”, “z”, “ts” (whistles), “sh”, “zh”, “ch”, “sch” (hissing).
Violations of the pronunciation of the sound “r” are extremely diverse. This is the absence of “r”: “uka” (hand), “koova” (cow), “sha” (ball); burry “r”, nasal “r”: the sound “r” is replaced by the nasal “ng”. Very often the sound “r” is replaced with the sounds “l”, “t”, “d”, “g”, “th”. For example, "luka" or "yuka" (hand), "kolova" or "kojowa" (cow), etc.
Another difficult sound is “l”. The shortcomings of its pronunciation are almost as numerous as those of the “r” sound. Here, too, the absence of sound is noted: “apa” (paw), “oshka” (spoon), “yudi” (people); there is a “bilabial” or labial-dental “l”: instead of “l” a sound is heard, intermediate between “u” and “v” - “uampa” or “vampa” (lamp), “uoshka” or “voshka” (spoon) ; nasal “l”, when the sound “l” is replaced by the nasal sound “ng”. There are also more rare violations, for example, the sound “l” is replaced by the sounds “r”, “d”, “n”, “th”, “v”, etc.
In cases where a sound is absent or is not articulated correctly, specially selected exercises are used to establish the correct alignment of the articulatory organs for pronouncing this sound. If there is a persistent replacement of one sound by another, this indicates that the child not only has insufficient articulatory function, but also poor discrimination of speech sounds. In such cases, along with exercises to correct articulation, exercises are also carried out to recognize sounds—the education of phonemic hearing.
We do not present here the exercises that are given to children to eliminate defects in the pronunciation of various sounds, because in each individual case the speech therapist takes into account the degree of the violation, its features and gives instructions in accordance with this. Under no circumstances should you try to correct your child’s pronunciation deficiencies yourself - you cannot do this without the help of a specialist (this applies not only to pronunciation disorders, but also to all other disorders, which will be discussed further).
Mechanical dyslalia is a more severe disorder: after all, the correct structure of the jaws, teeth, tongue, nasopharynx is necessary not only for the correct formation of speech, but also for proper nutrition, breathing, etc. If these functions are disrupted, the child often gets sick, his body weakens . With mechanical dyslalia, not only articulation often suffers, but also the understanding of the speech of other people, since these processes are closely interrelated.
If the structure of the lips is incorrect, they are not mobile enough, and, of course, the pronunciation of the labial sounds “p”, “b”, “m” and the labial-dental sounds “f” and “v” will suffer first of all. Poor lip mobility also affects the pronunciation of other sounds.
If there is an irregularity in the structure of the teeth or their absence, the articulation of sounds formed with the participation of the front teeth suffers - “s”, “z”, “ts”, etc.
The most common deviation in the structure of the jaws is an incorrect bite. Occlusion is the corresponding arrangement of the teeth of the upper cavity in relation to the teeth of the lower cavity. With the correct structure of the jaws, the upper incisors should slightly cover the lower ones, while the lateral molars close together. With an incorrect bite, the upper or lower jaw can protrude forward, a so-called cross bite occurs, etc. An incorrect bite disrupts chewing and breathing (the habit of breathing through the mouth develops). All these deviations in the structure of the jaws can lead to articulation disorders, which we talked about when describing functional dyslalia, in addition, additional sounds are often produced: lisping, smacking, etc.
Defects in the structure of the jaws and nasopharynx affect the shape of the face, and children painfully experience their physical disabilities.
Treatment should begin with an attempt to correct the existing physical defect. To do this, you need to contact a specialist in maxillofacial surgery as soon as possible. At the same time, you need to consult with a speech therapist about what exercises the child should do to make sounds.
Among the deviations in the development of the facial skeleton, congenital cleft palate (complete - along the entire length or incomplete) is often found. Currently, most experts recognize the need for early surgical intervention in these cases. Lip plastic surgery can be performed already in the first hours of a child’s life. For cleft palate, a prosthesis is made to cover the defect; The baby will then be able to suck. In the future, such a prosthesis will help the correct development of sound articulation. In the second year, it is already possible to undergo plastic surgery of the palate.
Parents should not hesitate whether to contact a surgeon; they should not postpone this until a later time, “when the baby grows up.” Speech therapy classes are of great importance, since it is very important for such children to establish correct breathing and sound of the voice, and to teach them the articulation of sounds. For cleft palates, speech therapy sessions should begin before surgery and continue after it.
Quite often there is a violation of the pronunciation of the sounds “r”, “sh”, “zh”, “ch”, “sch” when the hyoid ligament (“frenulum”) is shortened. The question of whether to trim the frenulum is decided depending on how much the range of tongue movements is reduced. Many experts are categorically against surgical treatment and recommend vibration massage and special tongue exercises.
This group of diseases also includes dysarthria, or a disorder of articulate speech, which occurs due to brain injury, inflammatory processes or cerebrovascular accidents. All movements, including articulatory ones, are very slow and awkward. Chewing and swallowing are difficult, so drooling is common. The range of movements of the tongue and lips is limited: the child cannot stretch out his lips, bare his teeth, or inflate his necks. The voice is quiet, muffled, and sometimes disappears completely. The pace of speech is slow, with uneven pauses.
The entire course of speech development in dysarthria is delayed, the period of babbling is often absent, by the age of 2-3 years individual words appear, and the child begins to pronounce phrases (short, usually incorrectly constructed) only by the age of 5-6 years. Later, the vocabulary increases, speech develops, but it remains illegible, blurred and monotonous. Some speech pathologists believe that children with dysarthria are mentally retarded. The majority find that in these children there is only a delay in the development of intelligence associated with motor and speech disorders. When their condition improves, such children can study well and exhibit normal mental abilities.
Children with dysarthria need observation by a neurologist (at least periodically). Since this disorder is always the result of a brain disease, it requires long-term and patient treatment. The same long and patient work should be carried out to correct speech defects - of course, under the guidance of a speech therapist.
Disturbances in the rhythm and tempo of speech.
Disorders of the rhythm and tempo of speech are of two types: non-convulsive and convulsive.
Often, children’s speech becomes incomprehensible and unintelligible due to the fact that its tempo is disturbed: it either slows down very much or speeds up very much - these are non-convulsive disorders.
Slowing down speech is based on an increase in the inhibitory process. There may be a drawn out, slow pronunciation of sounds in a word, pauses between them - the child pronounces words almost syllable by syllable (“vi...zu...so...ba...a ku..."); there may be lengthening of pauses between words (“give...me...your hand...”). Speech is monotonous, drawn-out, causing tension and fatigue in those listening, but the children themselves usually do not notice their defect.
Treatment consists of the use of tonics, therapeutic exercises and speech therapy rhythm classes.
The acceleration of the rate of speech is associated with the predominance of the process of excitation in the child. The faster rate of speech is combined with the fast pace of all motor reactions. When these children are excited, they experience even greater acceleration of speech, swallowing, rearrangement of syllables, etc.
The treatment of such children consists primarily of reducing their general excitability (with the help of medications, physical therapy).
Imitation plays an important role in the development of speech rate disorders. Therefore, if someone in your family has a violation of the rhythm and tempo of speech (and this is usually the case), then this person must also be treated, otherwise the child will have relapses all the time.
Stuttering is a disorder of the rhythm and tempo of speech with convulsive spasm of the speech muscles. It manifests itself in two forms - the so-called developmental stuttering and reactive stuttering.
Developmental stuttering is observed in early childhood, when the child still speaks poorly and has many articulation defects. If they talk to the baby at this time, teach him difficult words and phrases, then he may begin to stutter. So, Yura P., at the age of 2 years 10 months, recited many poems, sang songs, was constantly involved in the conversation with his parents and made everyone laugh by using such “adult” words as “unthinkable”, “agreed”, etc. And then one day, Telling his mother how he and his grandmother were walking and eating ice cream, Yura suddenly stumbled on this word: “M-mo... mm-mo...” - and then began to speak with a stutter.
Sometimes parents cannot indicate a specific moment when stuttering began - it develops gradually.
The development of this form of stuttering is based on overexcitation of the speech areas of the child’s brain. Therefore, the first measure should be to stop all conversations with the child. You need to calm the baby down, not allow him to talk, and limit your conversation with him.
Sometimes this “silence mode” corrects the situation within 7-10 days. Sometimes the disorder turns out to be quite persistent. As soon as a child begins to stutter, you need to contact a speech therapist and strictly follow all his instructions.
Reactive stuttering (which develops as a reaction to some strong influence) is most often the result of fear, mental trauma (severe conflicts in the family) or debilitating long-term illnesses.
Usually all children experience fright at some point, suffer more or less severe infections, and witness conflicts in the family. However, stuttering occurs only in a relatively small proportion of children. This is why doctors believe that children who have a predisposition to stutter begin to stutter—obviously, children with some constitutional weakness of the nervous system. Indeed, in children who stutter, you can usually see other signs of a neurotic state: poor appetite, restless sleep, night terrors, urinary incontinence, etc.
Specialists in the treatment of stuttering, for example S.S. Lyapidevsky, believe that the development of stuttering is always based on a weakened cortex: against this background, strong negative influences cause a breakdown of nervous activity - the development of neurosis, one of the manifestations of which will be stuttering.
In the treatment of stuttering, along with speech therapy, medical assistance is also necessary. A child who stutters must be under the supervision of a neurologist. Experience shows that the most successful treatment for stuttering is inpatient treatment.
We have already said that here we will not touch upon either the treatment methods or the nature of the exercises that are used in the treatment of certain speech disorders, so that parents do not try to start treating the child without the advice of a speech therapist and a doctor. But we can talk about preventing the development of stuttering in children - this is exactly what families and child care institutions should take care of.
In calm, balanced children, stuttering is observed extremely rarely, which means that special attention should be paid to the so-called nervous children - they are at risk of developing speech neuroses, and primarily stuttering.
For such children, it is especially important to establish a firm routine, to ensure that they get enough sleep and do not become overtired. It is necessary to create a calm environment for them in the family, kindergarten or school: children are equally hard-pressed by both rough treatment and quarrels and conflicts between loved ones.
Regarding small children, you must, in addition, be careful in speech loads: if the child is excitable, whiny, sleeps restlessly, etc., you should not read or tell him too much, you should not rush to teach him difficult words, complex phrases, especially if he has He also has “physiological tongue-tiedness.” Against the background of unpracticed articulation, an abundance of new difficult words will easily lead to a “disruption” of nervous activity.
From our point of view, preventing stuttering in nervous children is an extremely important task. If parents are forced to comply with all these conditions when trouble happens - the child begins to stutter, then, really, it is easier to take the necessary measures in advance and try to protect the baby from developing speech neurosis.
It should be kept in mind that stuttering often returns after treatment. The reasons for the relapse of stuttering are the same as the reasons that originally caused it: conflicts in the family and school, overwork, debilitating infections. Consequently, relapses of stuttering can be prevented if people around them try to create a calm environment for the child. (According to Professor S.S. Lyapidevsky, in the long term after treatment, good speech remains in 28% of children, speech deteriorates somewhat in 26.2%, a significant deterioration occurs in 25.3%, and stuttering resumes in 20.4% of children. This means , in 54.2% of patients the speech state turned out to be quite satisfactory even in the long term after treatment).
Hearing impairment and related speech disorders.
Until now, we have talked about speech dysfunctions in which the child’s hearing does not suffer. Meanwhile, even a slight deterioration in hearing leads to a delay in speech development. If there is significant hearing loss during this period, the child’s speech will not develop at all.
When they want to find out whether a small child can hear, they first of all check how he reacts to sounds of medium volume and loud ones: talking, screaming, ringing. If the baby does not turn around at these sounds, then with a high degree of probability we can say that he is deaf. However, if you slammed the door or clapped your hands and the child gave a reaction, this is not at all proof that he has hearing, since it will be a reaction to the vibration of the air, and not to the sound.
For older children - about five months or more - a good test is this: the child is given two identical sounding toys - two pipes, two rubber birds, two barrel organs, etc. One of them is working and sounds, the other is damaged. If a child can hear, he always chooses a sounding toy, but a deaf child plays with both toys or ignores both.
At the slightest suspicion of hearing loss in a child, you should consult a doctor. Children from about 5 years of age have the opportunity to very accurately determine the extent of hearing loss using a special device - an audiometer. An audiometer allows you to find out what sound vibrations and at what strength the child perceives. (The frequency of sound vibrations per second is determined in special units - hertz, and its strength - in decibels.)
When examining hearing using an audiometer, a curve is drawn: the sound frequencies within which the patient hears are plotted horizontally, and the strength of sounds at which they are perceived is plotted vertically. Hearing loss is characterized by both of these indicators.
Typically, people speak at a volume (that is, the intensity of sounds) of 20-40 decibels (db), and the frequency of sound vibrations ranges from 250 to 2000 hertz (Hz) - this is called the “speech frequency zone”.
Deafness does not mean that the ear does not detect any sounds: there are always some remnants of hearing. But the trouble is that they can only be perceived with a very high sound intensity - 80-100 dB (it must be said that 80 dB is a scream, and 100 dB is the fortissimo of a large orchestra).
Depending on what remains of the child’s hearing is, further work is carried out with him.
The age at which a child loses hearing is very important. The earlier this happened, the more severely it affects speech. Children who were born deaf and lost their hearing in the second or third year of life will be mute; they cannot master speech without special training. But the speech apparatus of these children is usually fine, they do not have damage to the speech parts of the brain, therefore, with proper training, the mental development of these children will be normal, and later they will develop sound speech.
Children who lost their hearing at 5-6 years old lose speech only in rare cases, and those who became deaf at 7-11 years old retain their speech completely.
Difficulties in mastering speech arise even when hearing is reduced by 15-20 dB - such cases are called not deafness, but hearing loss. These children also require special treatment and training.
Hearing loss and even deafness do not at all indicate that the child is doomed to mental retardation. One can cite a large number of examples where, despite severe hearing loss approaching deafness, children were able to study in a public school. But these are the cases when parents turned to a speech therapist early and worked hard with the children. Parents receive very detailed instructions and teach the child (learning with him) visual perception of speech (“reading” the facial expressions of a speaking person) and the perception of tactile vibration sensitivity (pronouncing vowels and voiced consonants is accompanied by vibration of the larynx, which can be felt by hand). This requires a lot of time and effort on the part of the family, but ensures the correct development of the child. Approximately the same work is carried out with deaf children, but their education, as a rule, is carried out in special schools.
The main thing that I would like to emphasize here is that with timely access to a speech therapist and systematic training, a hard-of-hearing and deaf child will grow up to be a full-fledged person, so parents should not lose heart. You need to set yourself and your child up for calm, long-term work, which, as a rule, ends in success.
Underdevelopment of speech and loss of existing speech.
Underdevelopment of speech activity (alalia) is either a consequence of the fact that the maturation of nerve cells in the speech zone of the left hemisphere is delayed for some reason, or the result of early damage to these cells due to infections, intoxications, birth injuries, or injuries shortly after birth. Loss of speech (aphasia) occurs with focal lesions of the speech areas of the cerebral cortex in children or adults whose speech has already been formed.
Alalia is divided into motor, when the child’s own speech suffers, and sensory, when understanding of other people’s speech is impaired. Usually, in practice, only a predominance of motor or sensory impairments is identified in a child. Motor and sensory alalia in its pure form almost never occurs.
In children suffering from alalia, speech develops late, the vocabulary is replenished slowly, and they are used incorrectly in speech. The child often looks for the desired sequence of sounds in a word, but cannot find it: this leads to multiple repetitions, rearrangement of syllables, and distortion of words. “Muneka...magak.ch...magaga,” five-year-old Grisha painfully selects sound combinations, trying to say the word “paper.”
Alalik children do not change words according to numbers, cases, there are no connectives in their speech, etc., so at 7-8 years old a child speaks like a two or three year old: “Katya is walking in kindergarten,” “the book is bang, the table is on the floor.”
Children with alalia usually do poorly in school. It is difficult for them to pronounce sounds in a sequence, so they read poorly, and poor reading technique interferes with the understanding of what they are reading.
Alalik children have insufficient development of motor skills - they are inactive, awkward, and slow. Many of them have great difficulty learning to dress, comb their hair, etc. Subtle movements of the fingers are undeveloped and uncoordinated.
Since there is underdevelopment of the speech areas of the brain, when working with alalik children, it is necessary to use other areas of the brain, more complete ones - auditory, visual or tactile, and in classes rely mainly on them. Usually these children have more or less pronounced neurotic layers. This also requires treatment. It is necessary to pay attention to the development of general motor skills; Speech therapists here note a particularly beneficial effect of rhythm classes. From our point of view, the training of fine movements of the fingers should also have a very big impact (surely you have heard about the close connection between the functions of the fingers and speech?).
In milder cases of alalia, parents, with the help of a speech therapist, can themselves cope with the child’s speech disorder. In more severe cases, the child must be placed in special medical institutions. Over the course of 3-4 months of treatment and education of the child in a hospital, children 5-6 years old with the absence of many sounds, with individual babbling words, begin to speak in phrases (of course, simple ones, such as “the children are going to school”, “Valya, to the book”), The vocabulary increases by several dozen words, the children memorize poems.
With aphasia, as with alalia, the disorders are usually mixed, however, as a rule, the loss of the ability to understand someone else's speech or the ability to articulate words predominates.
Here's an example. A 13-year-old boy, a 6th grade student, began to grow a tumor in the left temporal region. He began to forget the names of objects and people, then he stopped understanding even simple phrases. Along with such a gross violation of the understanding of speech, the boy easily imitated audible words and could even read mechanically, completely not understanding what he was reading. This is a case of predominantly impaired understanding.
Another example. A girl, also 13 years old, who developed a tumor in the temporal and inferior parietal regions. She had significantly less difficulty understanding the speech of others, but her own speech suffered greatly. For example, she said: “The girl is... growing... growing... growing her hair.”
Both of these cases ended successfully, and after the operation the children recovered.
Aphasia, even very severe, goes away relatively quickly in children if the main cause of the speech disorder is eliminated - a brain tumor is removed, hemorrhage after injury has resolved, etc.
Speech restoration occurs in children not only faster, but also more completely than in adults. However, one cannot rely only on the high regenerative abilities of the child’s brain. You need to treat the baby and you need to work with him. In the acute period, it is better to place the child in a hospital, where he will receive constant medical supervision; when the condition improves, he can be treated on an outpatient basis, while simultaneously conducting speech therapy sessions with him.
In conclusion, I would like to make a small summary.
The mental health of a child, including the development of full speech, largely depends on the attention and care of the family. Speech therapists claim that 80% of stuttering cases are of neurotic origin, which means that measures must be taken to treat any neurotic manifestations and reduce the excitability of children. Isn’t establishing a routine, creating a calm environment, and generally strengthening the nervous system in our hands?! Think what a huge percentage of speech neuroses can be prevented if adults feel sufficiently responsible for this!
One more question. When we talked about the treatment of various forms of speech disorders, we always emphasized the need for long-term and systematic work with the child. This is the main condition that will help you cope with trouble if it happens. Of course, parents and everyone who works with a child require a lot of patience and self-discipline. Adults must pay the most serious attention to the state of their own nervous system - a neurotic child always comes from a neurotic family. And if a child is being treated, and at home he finds himself in a tense environment, where they speak in raised voices, there are frequent conflicts, people are impatient and harsh, then the result of the treatment will be bad. Adults, not only in their own interests, but also in the interests of the child, must fight their neuroses, pull themselves together and restrain themselves from displaying negative emotions and poor health.
Dyslalia, dysarthria, disturbances in the tempo and rhythm of speech, alalia, aphasia - all these disorders can be completely overcome or a significant improvement in the child’s speech can be achieved, but you must help the child persistently, with love and faith in success!
Exercises for diction and articulation
Articulation
Since the tip of the tongue “works” very actively in clear pronunciation, there are several exercises that will help improve its activity.
1. Imagine that your tongue is a hammer and hit your teeth with its tip. During such blows, “pronounce” yes-yes-yes-yes. Then try to clearly pronounce the letters “T-D” .
2. To clearly pronounce the letters “K” and “G” you need to “pump up” your larynx. To do this, inhale through your nose and completely empty your lungs through your mouth. The release of air through the mouth should occur sharply and resemble the sound “Fu” . Do this exercise several times.
3. If you notice that you have a problem pronouncing the letters “P” and “B” , then train your labial muscles. To do this, you need to puff out your cheeks and release the air from your mouth with a vigorous clap.
4.It is also very important to learn how to control the amount of air. To do this, you need to use breathing exercises and practice in front of a mirror. Try reading a short text at normal volume. As a rule, you can easily control your voice. Now, do the same, but increasing the volume. There must be problems.
By regularly declaring the text at an increased volume, you will soon be able to control the amount of air needed and will be able to successfully speak in front of a large audience.
5.There is another exercise to improve articulation. Take a few lines from your favorite poem. Then eliminate the consonants from these lines and sing only the vowels. Then insert consonants and pronounce them loudly without changing the style of vowel pronunciation.
Articulation can also be improved with the following exercises:
diction
diction
If you notice that you are swallowing the endings of words, then read any text, emphasizing the endings of the words written in it. This needs to be done daily, and after a while you will be able to forget about this problem with your diction.
If you have a problem with the pronunciation of any particular letter, take a Russian dictionary and clearly read all the words starting with that letter. Do this regularly. If desired, record this exercise on a voice recorder.
Traditional noise reduction methods
I have already talked about the simplest traditional methods of noise reduction; they are used in conditions where we do not programmatically know what the nature of noise and speech is. This lack of information is also observed when we want to get rid of noise on the fly. With this noise reduction, ordinary or spectral thresholds are used - any echoes are muffled if they do not exceed a certain volume threshold.
Other traditional methods rely on modeling the distribution of pure speech or noise. This is done by finding the power spectral density (loudness) of the signal. Signal power density is a variant of describing the distribution of signal values at different points in time. The power spectral density of a signal, in turn, is a function that describes the distribution of signal power depending on frequency, namely, the possible power in different frequency units. In this case, having the noise power spectral density, you can use the spectral subtraction method.
Wiener filter is used as one of the traditional trainable denoising methods, somewhat similar to the spectral subtraction method. This approach is based on the optimal selection of a filter that would minimize the difference between the clean signal and the improved signal. Like some machine learning algorithms, the calculation of the Wiener filter minimizes the Mean Square Error (MSE) metric.
where is the spectrum of a clean signal, is the spectrum of a noisy signal, is the spectrum of a noisy signal.
Thus, the optimal Wiener filter can be found in cases where we know the “clean version” of a noisy signal, or if we know a specific noise that occurs in audio recordings that we want to remove.
Often, after noise filtering operations, anti-aliasing is applied to get rid of signal artifacts - "musical" noise - after cleaning. Various filters are used for smoothing, for example, a Gaussian filter (or Gaussian blur) [5].
Tongue twisters for the development of diction
Tongue Twisters
The most popular way to improve your diction is tongue twisters. They can also be used as a warm-up before a public speaking. In general, get into the habit of saying several tongue twisters every day. This training will help you overcome problems in pronouncing certain sounds and will make your speech more convincing and beautiful.
You don't need to set aside time for this type of training. You can repeat tongue twisters while getting ready for work. Experts believe that three weeks of using tongue twisters will make your speech smoother and your diction clearer.
Here are the most popular tongue twisters that will help improve your diction:
To practice sounds: r, l, m, n
diction
To practice sounds: b, p, v, f, g, k, d, t, x
diction
To practice sounds: s, z, sh, zh, h, sch, ts
diction
Components of competent speech
Speech is considered literate and clean if it has the following qualities:
- intelligibility, clarity;
- speech variety (the speaker uses synonyms and does not often repeat the same thing);
- expressiveness (words are pronounced with different intonations, facial expressions, sometimes there is gestures in speech);
- literacy (a person should try to avoid tautologies, speech errors, colloquial words, eliminate parasitic words and complex sentence structures).
Pronunciation should be smooth and confident. Make sure your breathing is not shortened.
How to improve diction? Tips and reviews
Christina. I’m from the South of Russia and used to often “ghekala”. When I studied in St. Petersburg I was very embarrassed about this. I searched the Internet and found a simple way to get rid of this speech defect. You just need to pronounce phrases containing the sound “Ge”. It is necessary to focus on this sound and pronounce it clearly. Within two weeks I began to pronounce this sound correctly and forgot about this problem.
Yuri. Even as a student, he participated in the drama club. Our leader tactfully hinted that my diction was not the best. And she asked me to read books out loud at least 30 minutes a day. I liked this exercise so much that I began to devote even more time to it. And the diction became noticeably better.
Why learn to express your thoughts?
How to manipulate people - can this be learned, methods of influence
How to learn to express your thoughts is taught at school. However, not every student can answer the question of why this is needed. When expressed well, you can respectfully, concisely and accurately describe information so that the interlocutor can easily understand everything. Competent speech shows the level of education and reading, this is valuable at all times. Also, clear speech can express thoughts out loud or on paper without distortion.
When a person is not verbally literate, it is difficult for other people to understand him, he has difficulty finding words. As a result, he develops a fear of communication, isolation and introversion.
If you are unable to express your thoughts, it is difficult to communicate with people even on the phone
Note! If you do not know how to write correctly, this will create difficulties when preparing papers, documents, and contracts. In this case, even a simple message will seem funny, causing an incident during communication. When a person does not have literacy in expressing thoughts, there will be a feeling that there is a lot being said, but there is no meaning in it.
