Help With Speech For Orthodontic Patients

For some patients, orthodontic appliances like retainers or lingual (behind the teeth) wires and brackets can cause some changes to their speech.  If this sounds like something you've been experiencing, no worries!  The more you talk, the faster you will adapt to your new appliances and your speech will improve.

With Incognito Braces (hidden braces placed behind the teeth), most patients feel like they are speaking with a lisp or that their voice sounds funny.  For these patients, we often recommend that they read the Rainbow Passage several times a day for the first few weeks with their new appliances.  This passage was developed by speech pathologists and contains many of the sounds and sound combinations found in the the English language. The Rainbow Passage is one of the most common standard reading passages to test an individual's ability to produce connected speech and correct any speech impediments.

If you have a new appliance and have noticed changes to your speech, try practicing the Rainbow Passage.  Remember, the more you talk the quicker you will adjust to your new appliance and your speech will improve - so keep talking!

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon.
There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Throughout the centuries people have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods. The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. The Norsemen considered the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from earth to their home in the sky.

Others have tried to explain the phenomenon physically. Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by reflection of the sun's rays by the rain. Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection, but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbows.
Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the drops; the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases. The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of a super-imposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green light when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue.

(The Rainbow Passage is a public domain text.)