Reminiscences of a common lisper

I have a lisp on /s/ that comes out only occasionally. It's not the common one where it sounds like the English “th” in “think” (/θ/), but some darkened, wet variant. Probably a lateral lisp ([ʪ]), but who knows.

Like I can't know because I can't do it on purpose, it’s both unconscious and sporadic. Worse yet, when it does come out, I’m completely unable to hear it—unless I'm recorded doing it by accident and listen to it later, then it becomes obvious. And that's the story of how my speech dysfunctions taught me important lessons about phonology.

Because that’s not just me; speech dysfunctions are generally imperceptible to the speaker when hearing their own voice “from the inside”. And it’s not just us lispers, either; lisps are simply a misapplication of how phonological processing works for everyone. Once your brain maps some acoustic input to a phoneme, you'll just fish that phoneme out of the signal and discard the details from conscious awareness. It's the same reason why, for example, English speakers can't hear or perceive that their ‘t’ in ‘stop’ is not the same as the ‘t’ in ‘top”, until it's pointed out and they study carefully about aspiration. Or why German speakers learning Arabic have to be taught about how Germans themselves automatically do a glottal stop before every syllable-initial vowel (which is a distinct consonant in Arabic). Or Japanese speakers have to be taught that the sounds they do for the consonant in “tu” and “ti” are not the same as in “ta” and “to”.

As a child I had a much more salient lisp: I used to pronounce /ɾ/ as a tapped G ([ɡ̆]). Since /ɾ/ is such a pivotal sound in Portuguese, this made my speech really funny, and I was sent to all sorts of speech therapists, who never managed to fix it. I remember my therapists as these like, super friendly adults who would play card games with me or take me out of the clinic to go have ice cream or something, so it was never an unpleasant experience. I also remember being made to do a long /r/ for as long as my breath holds, many times (for English speakers: that's like a move pirate “arrr” or a Scottish accent).

The sound I wasn't pronouncing properly, /ɾ/, is just a single tap of the multiple in /r/, so I was perfectly able to produce it. But I don't remember ever being told why I was being made to do those sounds. In fact, I didn't even know that my spontaneous /ɾ/ in words like “arara” was anomalous. Maybe the doctors didn't want to hurt my feelings, since lisps are such a sensitive subject, and I already struggled heavily with bullying in school for queer reasons. Or maybe there was some mistaken speech therapy belief that the problem with lisps was about production, rather than perception. But I was an analytical child, and I wish at some point someone had told me explicitly:

  1. That lisps are inaudible to the one producing them (which can be quickly demonstrated with a recording);
  2. That I had a velar tap for /ɾ/, which is unusual and perceived as a lisp;
  3. That the normal way to do it is apical alveolar, like all those “trrrrr…” exercises I had been doing.

Thinking today of the velar tap—not a phoneme in any language that I know of—I would compare it to the situation with the retroflex R, [ɹ], occurring both in USA English and in my native Caipira Portuguese (the latter only syllable-finally: “remar” [xeˈmaɹ]). Though called “retroflex”, this R can also be produced dorsally rather than apically, by raising the back of the tongue towards the vellum (in English they call that a “bunched R”, [ɹ̈]). The result sounds pretty much indistinguishable from a retroflex proper, and native speakers vary on which one they use. Myself, my native [ɹ] is bunched. Since /r/ and /ɾ/ are related phonemes in Portuguese, and since my 'strong /r/' was dorsal, and since /ɾ/ is a tapped /r/, I believe my language acquisition module settled on a dorsal tap for it. That is, when going from “remar” /reˈmar/ to “remarei” /re.maˈɾej/, just add a +tap feature to the bunched R: [xeˈmaɹ̈] → [xeˈmaˈɡ̆ej]. Unfortunately that doesn't sound anything like an apical /ɾ/, unlike the case of retroflex vs. bunched.

My first contacts with linguistics were in the context of learning Japanese. When I was 17 or so, already living alone in the big city, I was trying to make sense of descriptions of Japanese phonemes, without any training in phonology; and the datum that the sound in “ryōkai” (an /ɾ/) was supposed to be done with the tip of the tongue was so surprising to me that I stared at it blankly for a few seconds, unable to even process the information I was reading. It sounds so close to the Portuguese “r” in “arara”, and that's clearly done with the back of the tongue (right? right??) So I looked up how the /ɾ/ is done in my own language to understand the difference, and I was baffled even further to see it described as exactly the same as the Japanese “R”: a tap with the tip of the tongue touching the alveolar ridge. Like, what?

I then asked my roommate: roomate, when you say “arara”, do you do those Rs with the tip of the tongue or the back? He tried it a couple times. Uh, The tip?

Bafflement upon bafflement. An inkling on the back of my mind made me record myself saying “ryōkai” or “raku” or “tororo” (using audiorec(1) on NetBSD), and was shocked to hear the strange phoneme I produced when saying these words. I then tried to record myself saying Portuguese “arara” or “barata”, and this is how I first found out I had been pronouncing these words wrong all my life.

But that was a much more approachable problem than my S-lisp, because the R-lisp was consistent; I always did the /ɾ/ dorsally. Once I found out what was happening, I trained myself to do an apical tap instead. I don't think it took a week.

Nowadays I'm often in contact with Germans who learn Japanese, and they use a Hochdeutsch /ɣ/ for Japanese /ɾ/, which is a completely different sound and causes problems of comprehension—it can sound closer to /h/ to Japanese ears, so “goran” (look) can be taken for “gohan” (cooked rice), or “reinen” (the example year) by “heinen” (a non-leap year), etc. It would be much better to use L, the closest sound to /ɾ/ for a Hochdeutsch speaker, which maps to /r/ in Japanese phonology (in fact an L is little more than an /ɾ/ that lingers for a while longer, and many Japanese speakers realise /ɾ/ as [l] every once in a while).* But this is one of those cases where orthography misleads people—because these completely different sounds happen to be written with “the same letter” across languages, people are insistent in treating them as the same sound; it feels weird for them to use L for “a different letter”. And trying to say that hey, that sound you make doesn't really work for this, you want to do it by tapping the tip of the tongue—can make folk feel hurt and frustrated; many people are trapped in a belief that certain sounds are impossible for them to perform, and nothing can change that. So I found out why my old speech therapists were so reluctant to just tell me plainly “put this part of the tongue in this location to make this phoneme”. But for me at least, that was the information I had needed all along.