Phonics Help Please!

[Mlp18]

My son and I have been working through The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading and I am at a loss at how to explain to him why the short vowel a sound changes when it precedes the letters n and m. For example when you say the words man or ham you do not use the short vowel a sound that you use in the word mat. Am I crazy? I've looked all over the Internet and the book hasn't mentioned anything. Help please!

[domestic_engineer]

I think it may be a regional difference in pronunciation?!?  

 

When I say man, ham, & mat, they all have the same short a sound ... and the dictionary has the same short a vowel sound for all three words. 

 

To your ear, what sound does it change to?

 

[Mlp18]

The only way I can think to discribe it is to call it a distorted short vowel a sound? It starts out sound like short vowel a, my mouth is in the same position but the n and m change it? So it must be a regional thing? If it is how should I go about teaching it? My son can sound out the words properly but then hasn't a clue what the word is even though he knows it because it sounds wrong to him (and me!).

[Ellie]

My son and I have been working through The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading and I am at a loss at how to explain to him why the short vowel a sound changes when it precedes the letters n and m. For example when you say the words man or ham you do not use the short vowel a sound that you use in the word mat. Am I crazy? I've looked all over the Internet and the book hasn't mentioned anything. Help please!

 

They all sound the same to me. The slight difference caused by n and m are so negligible as to be not worth discussing. :-)

[Josh Blade]

I definitely can tell the difference you are talking about. It's almost like saying 'mayun' only not quite that pronounced. It's like a subtle mix of 'ay' and 'a' that makes it almost a two syllable word but not quite. It's hard to describe but noticeably there. I don't really have any advice, but I have been sitting around for about 5 minutes saying ham, man, and mat (probably looking insane) trying to figure it out. 

[fralala]

They all sound the same to me. The slight difference caused by n and m are so negligible as to be not worth discussing. :-)

 

 

I agree.

 

But what you might do is look in a mirror while you're saying each word slowly. Does the shape/position of your mouth during the /a/ portion of the word, or is it just hard to hear the similarity between the segmented sounds and blended sounds because, well, this is just not the way we think about our native language once we've mastered it. (This is how it is for me at least.)

[ElizabethB]

My blending video explains why. Also, this is the reason Webster's Speller and syllables are so powerful--syllables added together do not change, letter sound approximations do.

 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q4KTyqpg5o

[domestic_engineer]

I definitely can tell the difference you are talking about. It's almost like saying 'mayun' only not quite that pronounced. It's like a subtle mix of 'ay' and 'a' that makes it almost a two syllable word but not quite. It's hard to describe but noticeably there. I don't really have any advice, but I have been sitting around for about 5 minutes saying ham, man, and mat (probably looking insane) trying to figure it out. 

Ah!  This makes sense to me ... and it sounds more like a southern drawl?  Or at least a slight twinge?

 

If so, perhaps you can find an audiobook of a easy reader that has a lot of short a words but read in a neutral accent. Also grab the physical copy and follow along.  Or some phonics videos?  Along with doing word ladders?

 

More generally, after the child sounds out the word, I'd just confirm their sounding-out of the word and say, "That's the exact/proper way to say the word, XYZ.  However, sometimes people get lazy in their pronunciation and say the word this way *insert word*.  But if we know the proper way to say the word, then it will help us when it comes time to spell the word.  So it's important to know the exact pronunciation ... what the dictionary tells us.."

 

Just like we sometimes have to explain why Great Uncle Freddy uses wrong grammar, so sometimes we have to explain why the words aren't pronounced following the dictionary rules.

[Josh Blade]

I don't think it's necessarily saying it improperly or lazily. Even in the dictionary.com pronunciations of man and mat I can tell the subtle difference I was describing. After playing around for a while I think it's just the natural/efficient movement of lips and tongue from one sound to the other. At least in the A->N sense, when I say MAN my tongue is up in my mouth slightly higher on the a than when saying the a in MAT. This leads well into the n that's coming up. It feels uncomfortable to say MAN if I start with MA like it Mat. I'm honestly surprised there aren't different IPA spellings between the two a sounds. 

[ReadingMama1214]

I notice the difference, but never taught them differently. Dd is on lesson 107ish of OPG and I've noticed a few pronunciation differences. I noticed it with some short vowels and then most recently with the "ue" as long u. Dd seems to self correct for the pronunctions in the book. So the book says duel has more of a long u sound but we pronounce it almost as dewl. Dd will read it with a long u and then pronounce it as we typically do. I've never had to teach them any differently.

[MerryAtHope]

I had something somewhat similar with my kids when we covered the short O sound. In our region some O’s are short, and others are more of an “aw†sound. What I did with my kids was to make some words with tiles and play with the sounds orally.  I showed how to sound out each one as with the blending procedure (in our case, I used the words hot and dog,) and told them, “Most of the time, O says ‘ah’ as in hot. Many people pronounce dog that way too–dahg.  That feels kind of funny to our mouths doesn’t it?†And we had fun giggling about how strange that felt in our mouths.  â€œWe don’t say dahg here in our area–we pronounce it more like dawg.â€

 

Pretty soon they learned to recognize dog and words like it that had a slight change in the vowel sound due to our regional accent. If your kids have heard accents, you might even play around with trying to imitate some different accents, just to feel the different sounds in their mouths and to hear how the words might be pronounced differently in different regions.

[Tanaqui]

So it's important to know the exact pronunciation ... what the dictionary tells us.."

 

The dictionary doesn't "tell us exact pronunciation". Instead, the dictionary catalogs how people actually speak. WE determine correct pronunciation - not lexicographers.

 

To answer the actual question asked, it is common in many North American English accents to "tense" æ before nasals (and sometimes in other places).

 

Using technical terms, æ is a phoneme - that is, it's a sound we use in speaking. The /æ/ phoneme has two allophones (ways of saying it) in your dialect. One allophone is heard before nasals, the other is heard in other places. You can tell that to your child, and you can even use the technical terms - your kid doesn't know it's a specialized vocabulary, after all!

 

Many phonemes in English have multiple allophones. This is something you can prove scientifically with your kid! For example, the phonemes /p/, /t/, and /k/ are aspirated (said with a little puff of air) at the beginning of words, but not at the end. Test this out! Put your hand in front of your mouth and say the word "pin" a few times. Then say the word "nip". Feel that puff of air? That's the aspiration.

 

Here's another one: For many speakers, t before r is said more like ch. That is, /tʃ/ is an allophone of /t/ before /r/. A lot of adults don't realize this until their child starts to write - a small but significant portion of children will really write chruck and chree!

 

Of course, the other way to handle this is just to say that the letter a has another sound, which you only ever hear before nasals. Maybe you don't think more information is always the way to go.

[domestic_engineer]

The dictionary doesn't "tell us exact pronunciation". Instead, the dictionary catalogs how people actually speak. WE determine correct pronunciation - not lexicographers.

 

To answer the actual question asked, it is common in many North American English accents to "tense" æ before nasals (and sometimes in other places).

 

Using technical terms, æ is a phoneme - that is, it's a sound we use in speaking. The /æ/ phoneme has two allophones (ways of saying it) in your dialect. One allophone is heard before nasals, the other is heard in other places. You can tell that to your child, and you can even use the technical terms - your kid doesn't know it's a specialized vocabulary, after all!

 

Many phonemes in English have multiple allophones. This is something you can prove scientifically with your kid! For example, the phonemes /p/, /t/, and /k/ are aspirated (said with a little puff of air) at the beginning of words, but not at the end. Test this out! Put your hand in front of your mouth and say the word "pin" a few times. Then say the word "nip". Feel that puff of air? That's the aspiration.

 

Here's another one: For many speakers, t before r is said more like ch. That is, /tʃ/ is an allophone of /t/ before /r/. A lot of adults don't realize this until their child starts to write - a small but significant portion of children will really write chruck and chree!

 

Of course, the other way to handle this is just to say that the letter a has another sound, which you only ever hear before nasals. Maybe you don't think more information is always the way to go.

That's awesome Tanaqui!!!  Thanks for sharing your knowledge.  Is this the kind of knowledge one gains by studying speech pathology?  If not, what course of study would share this type of information?

[ElizabethB]

That's awesome Tanaqui!!! Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Is this the kind of knowledge one gains by studying speech pathology? If not, what course of study would share this type of information?

TC's Understandirng Linguistics has an excellent explanation of allophones with pictures. I have the dumbed down version for kids in the blending movie I linked.

Edited October 4, 2016 by ElizabethB

[Tanaqui]

This is the sort of thing one learns by reading Zompist's  Language Construction Kit 1,000 times during adolescence, and then studying linguistics in college.

 

If you're interested in the subject of linguistics (and who isn't!?), there are any number of blogs and sites which discuss it at an accessible level.

[ElizabethB]

There is also a short explanation with pictures of allophones on my Blending Page:

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/blendingwords.html

 

And pictures of sound waves showing this on my dyslexia page:

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/dyslexia.html

Edited October 4, 2016 by ElizabethB

[Bics]

I jumped on this thread because both my children so far learning to read have had trouble with this exact problem.  I have been using the oh-so-helpful-and-technical phrase "roll your mouth around a little until it sounds like we say it." :confused1:  To the original poster, my eldest now reads like a champ, so I do think it just comes eventually, but I am so glad to have a better answer for the child currently sweating through "ab, ac, ad, af, ag, . . . am-aim-ahm-aym (Frustrated huff or forlorn sigh)-am."

Edited December 3, 2016 by Whippoorwill

[Tanikit]

We have problems with words like fast which we pronounce f"ah"st... and there are numerous others. My children however have heard enough American television that I just tell them to spell it like the Americans say it and say it as we do afterwards. I think having an understanding initially that the aim of reading is to make sense of the text leads them to pronounce it as they usually hear it even if when sounding it out they get something different - "make it make sense" is something I say to any child who has read something and missed a single word's pronunciation.  Usually that corrects everything (but then I seldom get my children to read words individually and if I did I would make them say the word in a sentence afterwards).

[cabritadorada]

I love this thread--and ElizabethB, that video is great!

 

The /a/ with m or n issue is exactly the blending problem that I had with dd using AAR. I didn't notice the way short a changes at first--my mom, with her EdM in language and literacy, pointed it out to me as a reason that dd is struggling to blend--and she's totally right. The the tongue placement for /an/ or /am/ is in a different place than it is for /at/ or /ap/ and dd could not make the leap from saying the separate sounds to saying them as a word when the sound changes even a little bit.

 

My mom said that for kids who struggle with blending you can teach the vowel sound attached to the consonant that controls it (phonics programs already do this for more pronounced examples like r-controlled vowels, ang/ing/ung/ong, etc).

 

So, you teach -an and -am as word parts, and then the child works on blending it with the initial consonant. 

[ElizabethB]

I jumped on this thread because both my children so far learning to read have had trouble with this exact problem. I have been using the oh-so-helpful-and-technical phrase "roll your mouth around a little until it sounds like we say it." :confused1: To the original poster, my eldest now reads like a champ, so I do think it just comes eventually, but I am so glad to have a better answer for the child currently sweating through "ab, ac, ad, af, ag, . . . am-aim-ahm-aym (Frustrated huff or forlorn sigh)-am."

The university of iowa has an inexpensive app that shows the mouth and tongue position with pictures and side view videos, it is well worth the few bucks. They used to have the same thing for free on their website, my link is currently broken, it may still be there somewhere if you search around, it was called phonetics on the website. The app is called sounds of speech.