G.O.L.D
How do native English speaking children learn the "TH" sound?
I believe by the age of 8, parents would expect the final 'TH' sound to be produced consistently by their children. The "TH" sound is one of the most difficult sounds to be mastered by learners of English, so I wonder what it is like for parents to teach their young children how to pronounce this sound correctly.
I can think of something like this: The child says ‘fing’ for ‘thing’ or they say ‘dat’ for ‘that? Am I right? What is their learning process like? Is the ‘TH’ sound a later developing skill or children learn it as soon as they learn to talk?
<em>By the way, it took me years to master it.</em>
2020年7月5日 16:08
留言 · 8
3
Yes, the TH sounds are relatively hard for native speakers to learn as a child, but as long as the people who interact with the child pronounce TH correctly, the child should master it by the age of eight, as you say. If that doesn’t work, then yes, someone (maybe the school) may provide some extra help, where a speech therapist provides instruction to the small group of children in need of help. Just how we do it is an entire field of study (and probably boring to most readers here); you can probably find a rough outline with a web search. It’s obviously best to take care of such things ASAP, but even so, an expert like me can fix adult ESL learners in a matter of a few minutes per phoneme. (Let's keep in mind that prosody, more than any one phoneme, is also extremely important.) Continuing practice is of course necessary for a few minutes a day thereafter, to consolidate the fixes.
2020年7月5日
2
I wonder, is there a situation of overmastering the th-sound pronunciation that lead to lisp
2020年7月11日
2
Yes GOLD, you are right.
Actually, even native speakers tend to only master the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in <em>th</em>in) and the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (as in <em>th</em><em style="color: rgb(32, 33, 34);">is</em>) later in childhood.
No offense to the other poster, but no 'expert' can fix a phonetic or phonological constraint like this 'in a matter of a few minutes.'
The data seems to show that /ʃ, ɹ, θ, ð/ are among the last acquired phonemes in English (this holds true with native speakers as well).
Actually, in the majority of cases, very young native-speaking L1 (first language) English learners have some of the same problems with accuracy of pronunciation that many adult L2 (second language) learners of English tend to have.
For example, young children (with an English-only language background) tend to incorrectly enunciate and verbally soften, gloss over, and/or fail to produce a series of phonemes in sentences like: "There is something wrong."
Usually, they'll produce a sentence sounding like: "Dare is someting wonngg."
Interestingly enough, East Asian L2 learners of English often have similar difficulties with producing sentences or phrases in English with analogous phonetic complexity.
Lastly, I wonder if the popular practice of parents speaking gibberish to their children can be counter-productive in some ways. For example, if your child is experiencing difficultly with pronouncing a word and you knowingly reinforce their improper pronunciation in an attempt to get an added cuteness factor out of your interactions with them, is it possible you might also be doing them a disservice and impeding their development in some way?
Source:
Phonetic and phonemic acquisition: Normative data in English and Dutch speech sound development
G.H. Priester, W.J. Post, S.M. Goorhuis-Brouwer
Int J Pediatr Otorhinolaryngol 2011 Apr;75(4):592-6
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