Gwendolyn Sobkowiak | staff writer

I can’t believe how much time I spend thinking about my throat. You’ve probably all heard of the voice box.

The anatomical term for it is the larynx. It’s the organ that sits behind the Adam’s apple in the center of your throat. Well, really, it’s called your thyroid prominence, an extended portion of cartilage. If you touch your thyroid prominence gently and say, “This is my voice.” you can feel the cartilage vibrate. The vibration is coming from your vocal cords, also known as your vocal folds, which are two small muscles, usually just under an inch in length.

I learned all of this in my freshman year of college, sitting on my parents’ couch, reading through a textbook. I remember the electric feeling of putting anatomical names to things, it made my body feel scientific, and therefore more real.

Now, take your hand off your throat (if you’re still diligently left in this imaginary game of Simon Says) and make an /m/ like at the start of the word milk. See how long you can sustain the sound with a single breath.

Now hold your nose and repeat the process. If you created a good enough seal, you shouldn’t have been able to make much of any noise at all. This type of phoneme (speech sound) is referred to as a nasal. The vibrations and air that are usually exiting your mouth are being shaped by your nose for these sounds.

These discoveries may sound trivial to some, but to me it felt like I had found a whole new layer to our world. I had never really understood why having a stuffy nose had such a strong effect on how I sounded, but I was slowly learning about the various puzzle pieces that make up my voice.

When I was applying to college I had no idea that this is where I’d end up. I was overwhelmed by the seemingly limitless possibilities, and scrolled through pages of careers.

It was nauseating to review so many options, so I made a succinct list of things that I wanted instead. I wanted to do something that makes me enough money to be comfortable, that is dynamic and I wanted to do something that helps people.

This process got me to the root of what I was looking for, and I was able to ruthlessly gut my search for a major. It was down to a career as a public defender, speech-language pathologist or a social worker. Law school sounded rough, social work sounded like it may make me cry. I was left with speech-language pathology.

I pictured myself working with kids in a little, happily decorated room, showing them flashcards with animal pictures for them to name. “Good,” I thought. “I love little kids, and I love talking.” It seemed like just the thing. I didn’t really understand what I was signing up for. I don’t think most people really know everything that SLPs are trained to do before they receive their required master’s degree.

For starters, we have speech sound production, arguably the most well recognized field of study. Think of lisps, or problems with /r/ sounds.

There’s also fluency, a term that’s undergone a lot of rethinking in the past 20 years. This type of therapy used to look at stuttering in a curative manner, but research and testimonials have come to prove that the way we’ve been going about it hasn’t really been effective. Voice and resonance has to do with interference to the sound systems I referenced at the beginning.

We also support the output of receptive and expressive language and social aspects of communication.

These are associated with individuals on the spectrum. Cognitive aspects of communication are known for their associations with a condition called aphasia, an acquired neurological disorder many people experience following strokes.

People are becoming more familiar with augmentative and alternative communication devices. The least well known aspects of our field seem to me to be our work with hearing and its impacts on speech and language. As well, no one seems to mention feeding and swallowing, but we’re making our rounds of the hospitals all the same.

My professor once put it like this: “We’ve branched into everything from the diaphragm up.” SLPs aren’t limited to the halls of elementary schools; we’re respected and impactful medical professionals. We treat speech (the physical verbal production of communication), language (the system of symbols that make up communication), basic life functions and, by proxy, everything in between.

The name of the field is kind of limiting. Speech-language pathology states two things — not so much is said about the rest.

The deeper you get into any field of study the more nuance is revealed.

I learned about phonetics and then painstakingly, learned to write in it. I learned about speech-sound disorders and learned that there were neurobiological reasons that my grandfather couldn’t talk after his stroke.

Concepts in my life that I felt I understood gained meaning, and new ones appeared. I couldn’t have anticipated most of what I learned at the start.

The whole journey has taught me a lot of humility. My major is much more complicated and difficult than it seemed at first glance. There’s a reason behind the picture cards, and there’s a lot more going on in my field than meets the eye.

In a funny twist, though, I’m still in this program for the same reasons I started it. I’m happy to know that I’ll basically have a guaranteed job when I graduate. I’ll get to do something new every day. Most importantly, I get to have a real and tangible positive impact on the world around me.

It’s been neat to take audiology and neuroscience, and it’s been an honor to get to apply them in the real world. My major has provided me with a lot of fun facts (like the only floating bone in your body is called the hyoid bone and it helps you swallow) and a lot of life advice (I’ve used the techniques I learned in my counseling class too many times to count). But at the end of the day, I’m grateful for the depth this study has brought to my life. Every day I get to communicate feels like a miracle of anatomical coordination. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to thinking about my voice in the same way.

Gwendolyn Sobkowiak can be reached at sobkowiakg@duq.edu