PFSP-Day 2-More Stretched Syllable

This afternoon some things came up which I could not control, and as a result, I lost 5 hours of my day. Therefore, this will not be as in depth as I would like.

Basically today we continued our work on the Stretched Syllable target. We moved from multi-syllable words to sentences, and finally paragraphs. When you get into paragraphs, it’s easy to stop examining every syllable, thinking you can wing it effectively. But I believe this is where I had a problem when I took the therapy in 1993, this is something I quickly lost track of, and I started stretching the non-stretchables. Which, of course, causes problems. I mentioned this to the therapist today, and she said she believes, forgetting the first syllable to stretch may be the leading cause of remission.

Other things to touch on include :

• When you are going to block on a vowel, you may be able to overcome it by very lightly, even inaudibly, pronouncing an ‘h’ in front of it.


• Sometimes words like ‘IS’ is tricky to figure out what to stretch since S’s are not stretchable. However, in this case the ‘S’ is pronounced as a ‘Z’. ‘IS’ sounds more like ‘IZ’.


• You can have multiple non-stretchable sounds in before the first stretchable sound. Take ‘STRETCH’ for example; both the ‘S’ & ‘T’ are non-stretchable before the first stretchable syllable ‘R’.


• Self correct ASAP. And don’t go back to the start of the sentence, or even the start of the word. Just go back to the problem syllable, and correct it.


• Errors in practice will create errors in the pattern. So accurate practice is important.

As part of our homework this evening, we had to practice the stretched syllable on 7, 4 word sentences, and read 2 short paragraphs (one over the phone). This took an excruciating 90 minutes, even though I had few problems!

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Not meant as advice, please find a qualified therapist if you are interested in similar therapy.