Hi everyone,
I have two male students (Spanish speakers) who display a very peculiar technique for voicing. Their vocal folds vibrate at very low frequency, producing a very distinct ‘droning’ sound. This sound completely interferes with the quality of their consonants, so that ‘must’ becomes ‘mush’ and ‘recovered’ ‘recovid’.
Interestingly enough, it seems to be strongest when they are relaxed and attempting to speak ‘properly’; when they are more anxious to get a point across, for example in a debate, the effect is much less.
Both of them display the same ‘droning’ quality in Spanish, too, but here it is less of a problem because after all Spanish is their mother tongue and it also seems to rely less on the exact production of consonant clusters.
I have been trying to get them to focus more on their tongue and lips, with some encouraging results, but I have noticed that they have only limited control over this feature of their speech. So I would like to find out whether this ‘condition’ exists in the literature about the teaching of pronunciation, and whether there are any specific activities to control it.
I should add that these people are future High School English teachers, so it does seem quite an important handicap.
Thanks, Patrick