#speech tag

[zhuzhudushu]

I just read your navigation page thing and was just curious about what it’s like to be a speech pathologist? I’m in college and was looking at jobs to do with language and this came up. I wasn’t sure about it at first but now I’m considering.

Ahh! Yes I can talk about my field forever lol.

I will say it is SUPER different depending on which area of specialty you're looking into. I don't know what you know of the field but you can work with children or adults, from infancy all the way through elderly. I've worked with <24 hours old infant to my oldest patient who was 106.

You can work in nursing homes, hospitals, outpatient rehab, inpatient rehab, acute care, private practice, ENT or audiology clinics, NICUs (infant intensive care unit), school systems (K-12), and preschool/daycares.

In case you want to know: schools pay the worst (bc summers off are unpaid), nursing homes and PRN medical positions (meaning "as needed" - part time & no benefits) pay the most.

So... that's a lot. We do way more than literally anyone is aware of, even other healthcare workers.

All that to say, my experience is not necessarily the same as a speech therapist working in another setting.

I'm currently working in a small hospital, in both acute care with adults, and outpatient with kids. I like it, and actually just got a better job that's full-time outpatient with kids starting next month. I work with everything from children with autism, speech delays, articulation disorders, cerebral palsy, down's syndrome, etc. in outpatient, to strokes, brain injuries, dementia, covid/respiratory concerns, post-ventilator, head & neck cancer, or really any diagnosis in acute care.

So.. it's a lot lol. I really like my job. It's a lot of hard work, and grad school sucks ass. But with my new job I start next month, I will make enough money to live alone in my own apartment independently and still save some money. It's not a perfect field (it's literally 95% white women nationwide so... keep that in mind) and there's actually a lot of prejudice and ableism, but I hope to part of the change to fix it. It's a financially stable career, and a desperately needed career. If you love language/linguistics and want to help people, I would highly recommend it!

If you want language specifically (meaning you would be working more with language than speech/swallowing) then you're probably going to want either kids with language delays, which can be found in any pediatric setting, OR adult outpatient or inpatient rehab, where language-based and cognitive-based therapy is the most common.

I am always open to speech questions!! If you'd like me to expand/clarify anything I mentioned here (I tried not to use too much medical jargon but lol) or something else entirely let me know. Since I work with kids and adults everyday I'm a very general practitioner ;D

[goldenskykaysani]

ok i knew marwan had the range but i watched wolf and oh my goodness he has The Range????? in this one movie alone???? the way he is so soft in some scenes and so cold in others.....the nuance of it all.....

[mouthsounds]

hey everyone check out this kingdom hearts billboard that’s been up in the next town over on a rural backroad for at least five years now

[chaoticneedles]

Ways in which I was a gay catastrophy this weekend with the extended family:

- recommended The Ellen Show to my aunt

- kept talking about Sarah Paulson (and why she wasn't in love with Sandra Bullock in Bird Box) with my sister

- got into an argument with her about which girl is hotter, the one in the first Now You See Me or the one in the sequel

- started making salty jokes about childbirth after being reminded that grandma had 2 children when she was my age

- laughed out loud at the prospect of having a boyfriend for two minutes straight

- lectured my uncle about political correctness

[zhuzhudushu]

I just found your blog (I am learning Chinese so I keep getting the blogs of other language learners reccomended) and while scrolling through it, I ran across that other ask about being a speech pathologist. If you don't mind a question from an absolute stranger - do you happen to have a book rec for understanding American accents & pronunciation geography? I'm a native English speaker, but my foriegn friends keep asking me English pronunciation questions and I can't answer them - I generally want to answer "well, in some cities they say it that way, but in other cities they say it that other way, so both are fine". But their textbooks say it has to be one way, and that just confuses me so much. (one recent example was when to pronounce "the" as "thee" vs "th-uh" "Th-uh apple" and "thee apple" Both sound natural to me but "th-uh apple" is my normal. But apparently that is "wrong" for most of the USA?) I'd like to get a better understanding of what defines mainstream English and what parts of my own speech are a geographic quirk.

Also, I feel like the thing making my friends sound foriegn isn't pronunciation details like that, it's more rhythm and tone or something, but I don't have the vocabulary or background knowledge to figure out what part of their speech sounds off or how to fix it, so if you have a rec for a basic "how speech works" book I'd love that too. (I'm not asking for a book that will magically give me all the knowledge of your profession- that is obviously impossible. But I'd like to learn at least a little since I get asked these types of questions so very very very often and I feel like I am generally exceptionally unhelpful, to my dismay. (I have tried some random linguistics books and they were a) very dense and difficult and b) not really covering what I was looking for.)

Any advice is appreciated! (But there is absolutely no urgency and it's not very important, so don't feel obligated to like, do research or even reply if you can't think of something appropriate for laymen off the top of your head.)

OMG Longest Ask Ever Award??

I have also come across foreign speakers who were told they Had To Pronounce Things This Way, but in my experience, if they get snippy with me about it when I tell them that's not true, then I will send them to videos or TV shows to show real speakers pronouncing it a variety of ways. Once I sent a friend an Appalachian accent video and she couldn't understand it at all which was funny.

When I was in grad school, unfortunately the only real resources we had were for AAE (African American English) dialect, because my field has a horrible history of diagnosing Black children (especially boys) with language disorders for "incorrect grammar" that was really just a dialect. This was really the only dialect we studied.

But really, in my experience with intermediate+ English learners, they are VERY aware that words have multiple pronunciations. I mean, especially in Chinese, they should know that's true because those with Taiwanese and Beijing accents can struggle to understand each other (for just one example). Also, many of my Chinese friends learn British English, and are very aware that different English-speaking countries have different vocab and pronunciation.

I also agree that for the most part, if non-native speakers are difficult to understand, it's less about pronunciation of individual sounds, and more about the flow of the sounds together. We combine sounds, we skip over some, we connect them, and also - especially for tonal language speakers - their intonation doesn't sound natural and it throws native English listeners off.

But unfortunately I don't know of any good accent book resources. But to help you search yourself, the Normal (white i mean what) dialect is formally called Standard American English in educational settings. If you google that you might be able to find some books on it. This also goes for Standard British English and Standard Australian English.

I haven't watched them but WIRED on youtube has a whole set of videos about a US Accent Tour lol You could check those out?

[mouthsounds]

a note to the cishet people that sometimes roll up into pride club at my college: I’m not gonna kick you out but please note when we’re going around doing names and pronouns, “call me whatever” is not the correct answer

[mouthsounds]

idk if anyone still plays pokego but here’s my friend code!! feel free to add me for special research

[chaoticneedles]

yesterday I met a beautiful milf who is a director of lesbian & gay films and we talked and now I wrote her an e-mail offering my help in any project she might have coming up and she answered and said I should join her lesbian activist group I am in gay panic mode SEND HELP