> A speech impediment which is cute in a small kid but weird in middle school and socially+career-limiting in an adult.
Amusingly enough, I had such a thing in elementary and middle school: I couldn't pronounce "r" or "l", but was convinced I was pronouncing them fine. (No one showed me a recording of my speech.) I was sent to speech therapy and learned some alternate way of pronouncing "r", which I almost never carried out because it wasn't what I'd originally learned and seemed weird and wrong.
Eventually, I had a dental appliance (a "butterfly expander") removed from my mouth, and I resumed correct pronunciation of "r" and "l" sounds immediately (while still in the dentist's office, I think). The expander sat just below the roof of my mouth, blocking a certain range of my tongue's movement that is indeed involved in making "r" and "l" sounds.
I wonder if the speech therapists knew about such things.
It's not visually obvious like braces; it's on the roof of the mouth and behind the teeth. You'd have to be looking upwards into my open mouth to see it, and if you're an adult—taller than a child—you wouldn't usually be in a position to do so. Here's a reasonable approximation to what I remember it being:
Incidentally, I find one other case on the internet that bears some resemblance: "I had a narrow jaw, and I had a palate expander when I was 11. Basically, my mouth was way too small for my tongue in a way that pulling five teeth and doing spacers couldn't fix (we had to do that too, in addition to the palate expander). I had a pretty severe speech impediment (largely -R and -L sounds), and the expander cleared that up (after four years of speech therapy that did nothing). It was amazing! When they took it out, I could just TALK. I used to come home from speech crying because the teacher would tell me I wasn't practicing and wasn't getting better, and I WAS practicing so, so frequently. I just physically could not make certain sounds." https://community.babycenter.com/post/a51272845/narrow_upper...
According to my mom, I had been mispronouncing R and L as far back as age 2, and there wasn't any period before the expander was removed when I did pronounce it correctly. So my experience exactly matches that of the above internet citation regarding pronunciation, speech therapy, and expander removal.
Amusingly enough, I had such a thing in elementary and middle school: I couldn't pronounce "r" or "l", but was convinced I was pronouncing them fine. (No one showed me a recording of my speech.) I was sent to speech therapy and learned some alternate way of pronouncing "r", which I almost never carried out because it wasn't what I'd originally learned and seemed weird and wrong.
Eventually, I had a dental appliance (a "butterfly expander") removed from my mouth, and I resumed correct pronunciation of "r" and "l" sounds immediately (while still in the dentist's office, I think). The expander sat just below the roof of my mouth, blocking a certain range of my tongue's movement that is indeed involved in making "r" and "l" sounds.
I wonder if the speech therapists knew about such things.