ENUNCIATION

Objective: Increase mouth movement to strengthen enunciation, reduce mumbling and increase speech clarity

Read out loud — 5 minutes a day

  • Read something you’ve already read or are uninterested in
  • Focus on how you’re saying the words, not on what you’re saying
  • Feel the movement in your mouth as you speak
  • Energize your tongue movement; feel it lifting and bouncing around in your mouth
  • Feel your lips touching and rounding
  • Exaggerate the movement (it should feel weird for a bit)

Read the “over-articulate” reading passage daily (ideally in the morning) Really exaggerate the mouth movement for this exercise in particular

Jaw Drop:

  • To develop a new pattern of “release” (stretch) in the jaw muscles
  • Do this exercise daily, preferably in the morning
  • Let your jaw drop into a completely released “hanging loose” position
  • Rest the entire weight of your tongue behind your lower lip.
  • Hold this position for 1-2 minutes (don’t hold your breath)
  • Breathe in and out through your mouth

Lip Stretches:

  • Pucker/Smile
    • Do these every morning in front of the mirror
    • Round your lips and push outward (exaggerate the movement), then retract lips back into an exaggerated smile
    • Go back and forth between a pucker and smile moving slowly 10 times. Try to keep the neck muscles as relaxed as possible
    • Then repeat, this time moving a little quicker, back and forth 10 times (while maintaining an awareness of strong, exaggerated lip movement)
    • Finally, repeat the sequence again, but this time turn your voice on: Moving from an “ooo” sound (lips puckered) to and “eee” sound (lips retracted into a smile )

Tongue Babble

  • Stick tongue out AS FAR as you can and keep it there
    • This does not work if the tongue is only 1/2 way out
  • Then start speaking aloud, keeping your tongue out of your mouth as you speak
  • Speak aloud for ~20 seconds - can count in sets of 15-20 numbers (don’t repeat same numbers all the time), or read/speak a few sentences aloud
  • Try and articulate as clearly as possible (this is difficult, but by trying to speak clearly you are getting the back of the tongue to work harder, which is key to stretching the tongue and opening the throat
  • Do this exercise daily (preferably 2-3 times if possible).

Soft Palate Exercise

Warm up the voice & work to lift the soft palate every morning

  • First: Cycle through all the vowel sounds, adding a consonant of your choice to the front of the vowel:
    • bee / bay / bi / bo / boo / bah
    • dee / day / die / do / do / dah
    • gee / gay / gi / go / goo / gah

  • Focus on feeling the soft palate lifted as you say each syllable (Once you get a handle on lifting the palate, you can skip the above step and go straight to reading)

  • Then: Read out loud for 3-5 minutes
    • Focusing solely on keeping the palate lifted as you read (you should feel like there’s a big open space at the back of the mouth when the palate is lifted)

Soft Palate Info:

  • When the soft palate is at rest, it should be raised/lifted
  • The only time it lowers is for the nasal sounds M, N, NG
  • It is lifted for ALL other sounds!
  • You only need to focus on lifting the soft palate, don’t worry about lowering it (it will always lower when it needs to, we don’t need to direct that in any way)

Ways to lift the soft palate:

  • Imagine drinking from a straw (or actually drink from a straw). The soft palate raises so liquid doesn’t go up your nose
  • Pretending to sip an imaginary glass of water. This also raises the soft palate for the same reason as above
  • Making an exaggerated “surprise” face also helps lift, but not as distinctly as the two ways above

Ways to feel the soft palate lower:

  • Imagine you are smelling a flower

Lip Circles

do these every morning in front of the mirror (goal = to be able to move the tongue independently of the lips)

  • Let the lips rest floppily over the tongue as the tongue moves around behind the lips — making circles moving from upper to lower lip
  • Work to let the lips be as loose and “floppy” as possible
  • Move the tongue SLOWLY
  • If you notice the lips tightening in a certain area, swipe around that area (slowly) until the lip begins to release
  • Can also just hold the tongue in different spots until the lips soften