What is it about?

Disney's film "Encanto" is not just a fun movie with fun music - it is also a potential intervention tool for speech-language pathologists to use with their speech sound kiddos! We demonstrate that the song "Surface Pressure" contains rhotic ("r") sounds in an accessible and meaningful way that can provide ample opportunity for practice - more than even typical conversation.

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Why is it important?

"Encanto" is a Disney movie that has reached children and adults of all ages. The song "Surface Pressure" and its relevance to an audience that could benefit from intervention for "r" sounds sets it apart from traditional types of speech therapy involving repetition - word lists, picture cards, etc. Music has long been involved in other types of therapy, but the proportionally high number of "r" sounds in the song means that it can be incorporated into speech intervention by offering a lot of opportunities for practicing those difficult sounds in a relevant and meaningful way.

Perspectives

I was very excited when the concepts behind this article started to come together, especially when my graduate student co-author came on board. Many speech-language pathologists perceive speech sounds and phonetic transcription to be tedious and uninteresting, and will gravitate towards seemingly more impactful areas such as child language, acquired disorders in adults, and swallowing. I hope that this article can be not only fun and accessible to a wide audience, but also that it presents to this audience the notion that speech sound intervention CAN be relevant and meaningful.

Dr. Sarah Lockenvitz
Missouri State University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Under the Surface: Rhoticity and Relevance in the Song “Surface Pressure” From Disney's Encanto, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, December 2023, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2023_persp-23-00087.
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