Etch

I love to hear that boy talk.  He's at the sweet-n-cute age when his vocabulary outpaces his ability to enunciate.  He used to simply not say any word containing a sound he couldn't pronounce, even when he could prove in other ways that he knew that word.  He still has trouble with diphthongs, but now he picks one letter of the diphthong to pronounce, hence [t]ruck and [d]rink.  And he can pronounce his Rs just fine, but not Ss.  Stop is bop (usually "BOP!!", more accurately), sip is bip (again, more often "a BIP!! pwee, duh-DEE!").

But he still makes his characteristic sound, which we all love.  It sounds kind of like "etch," but with more of a raspberry-type sound at the end.  Sylvia always incorporates it into her Julius impressions.  Any word that he still doesn't want to pronounce becomes an "etch."  The interesting thing is that you can tell he is thinking real words and trying to communicate them, just "etch"-ing them out.  So when he counts off before taking off like a sprinter, he says, "etch... etch... GO!"