Acquiring rhoticity across languages: An ultrasound study of differentiating tongue movements

ABSTRACT

Rhotics in many languages develop late and show clinically significant misarticulations. The English approximant and Spanish trill rhotics exhibit both a primary constriction along the palate and a secondary constriction in the pharynx. We speculate that the secondary constriction might be a cross-linguistic characteristic of rhotics and thus potentially a factor in delayed articulatory development/misarticulations. We describe an exploratory study analyzing rhotic tongue configurations in ultrasound videos from a small sample of native adult speakers of English, Malayalam, French, Persian and Spanish. Our findings confirm that rhotic sounds most subject to late development also involve tongue root movement towards a pharyngeal constriction, but this conclusion must remain tentative without further research. In the meantime, clinical strategies that include attention to primary and secondary constrictions should be explored for remediation of rhotic misarticulations across languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-linguistic
• phonological acquisition
• rhoticity
• speech sound disorders
• ultrasound

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the various speakers of Persian, French, Spanish, Malayalam and English who contributed their time and effort to help this study. We also gratefully acknowledge the scholarly contributions of students Varsha Nair, Brittany N. DeMott, Kirsten Mosko and colleagues Hedieh Hashemi Hosseinabad and Lina Motlagh Zadeh.

Funding

This study was partially funded by USA National Institutes of Health awards R01 DC005250 and R01 DC013668 to Suzanne Boyce, plus an Ohio Speech-Language-Hearing Doctoral Research Grant to Sarah Hamilton.

Declaration of interest

The authors of this article report no declarations of commercial interests.

Notes

¹ US phonetic tradition often uses the symbol [ɚ] for syllabic and post-vocalic [ɹ]. In this article, we follow Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) by using [ɹ] for all positional variants in rhotic dialects. The same set of tongue configurations can be found in all contexts in rhotic dialects of English (Boyce et al., 2011).

² The Puerto Rican Spanish speaker is bi-dialectal in Puerto Rican Spanish and decided to use what he felt was the prestige variety of Spanish for his recording. The prestige variety has a coronal rhotic (an apicoalveolar trill /r/), while vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish uses a dorsal rhotic (uvular fricative /ʁ/, which our speaker produced when asked). The speaker’s decision to use the prestige form may correspond to sociolinguistic pressures on the island (Zentella, 1987).

³ Note that we transcribe the Malayalam speaker’s productions as heard, though in Appendix A, we use the orthography and transcription from Punnoose (2011) as the record of stimuli presented to speakers.

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially funded by USA National Institutes of Health awards R01 DC005250 and R01 DC013668 to Suzanne Boyce, plus an Ohio Speech-Language-Hearing Doctoral Research Grant to Sarah Hamilton.