My voice comes from a box
If I say “fee-fi-fo-fum,” I can feel the place where my voice comes
from. I put my fingers on my throat and I can feel my throat moving.
My voice comes from my voice box, called a larynx. My voice box is in
the middle of my throat. In it are tiny muscles called vocal cords.
Breath from my lungs makes my vocal cords move. When they move fast,
they make a sound. I can see how this works by blowing up a balloon,
then pinching the neck. When I let the air out through the neck, it
moves and makes a sound.
As soon as I was born I could make sounds. Air from my lungs moved my
vocal cords when I laughed or cried. People understood what those sounds
meant. But I couldn’t talk.
As I grew, I found that I could use my nose, tongue, teeth, and lips to
help make different kinds of sounds. I said muh, duh, and eee. I
began to copy the sounds of people around me. I put the sounds together
to make words like mama, daddy, and mine.
As I got bigger, I learned bigger words— penny, grandma, surprise,
and chipmunk. Now I can say words like elephant and television and
astronaut.
Air helps me speak
Air goes from my lungs, through my trachea, and into my larynx. In the
larynx, the air moves my vocal cords back and forth and makes sounds.
People who are partly deaf may not hear all the sounds in a word. To
speak clearly, they need to learn to make sounds they cannot hear. This
child is watching his mouth in a mirror while he learns to say a sound
correctly. He is wearing a very powerful hearing aid that helps him hear
the sound.
