Three trees

"Three trees" is a hard phrase to say. It's those damn interdentals again. V has just recently started distinguishing interdentals from stops within the past few weeks.

In fact, there was a particular moment. Looking out our kitchen window one day, she wondered, "Tree and tree. Tree, like those things out there, and tree, like this." And she showed me three fingers. She hadn't yet figured out that the words even sound different, let alone that they are pronounced differently.

Not that I am trying to torture my child with pronunciation exercises, but I have to admit that at that point I had been trying to see for a while already if she seemed physically capable of producing the "th" sound, in a word like think. I showed her how my own tongue was right between my teeth when I said the first sound in think or in three. She tried with all her might, but the sound came out sounding more like some kind of combination of /l/ and /θ/, like the lateral fricatives in Welsh, in words like Llewelyn.

She's been working on it, though. Right now, the system is in flux. The number "3" sometimes comes out as "tree" and sometimes as "three." That is what is demonstrated in the video.




The first time she says "3" in the video, she nails it. It's got a perfectly enunciated interdental. The second time, it comes out as "tree." I suppose it will only be a matter of weeks at this point before she has fully acquired the interdentals. And, at the age of 5, this is right on target -- exactly what research on the acquisition of English as a mother tongue tells us to expect.