Transcribing rhotics in normal and disordered speech

ABSTRACT

The IPA’s comparative lack of dedicated symbols for sonorant consonants as compared to obstruents presents some difficulties for clinical phoneticians. Among these are the ways of transcribing apical versus bunched approximant-/r/, the bilabial approximant realisation of target approximant-/r/, and fricative rhotic realisations of approximant-/r/ in normal and disordered speech. This note reports some developments in transcription that would allow clinical phoneticians to avoid the use of difficult-to-read diacritics when transcribing these sounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Approximants
• disordered speech
• normal speech
• phonetic transcription
• rhotics

Declaration of interest

The author reports no conflicts of interest.