15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Acoustic Strategies for Production of American English "Retroflex" /r/

Zhaoyan Zhang (1), Suzanne Boyce (2), Carol Y. Espy-Wilson (1), Mark K. Tiede (3)

(1) University of Maryland, USA
(2) University of Cincinnati, USA
(3) Haskins Laboratories, USA

The variety of articulatory configurations used for American English rhotic liquids suggests that speakers used different articulatory strategies to achieve similar acoustic goals. In this paper, we focus on a variant of this liquid produced with strong retroflexion of the tongue tip and no sublingual space. Previous models of "bunched" articulatory configurations and less extreme "retroflex" versions of /r/ have ascribed the F3 resonance to the front cavity. In this paper, we propose that speakers who use the extreme retroflex version of /r/ have switched the cavity affiliation of F3 to the back cavity.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Zhang, Zhaoyan / Boyce, Suzanne / Espy-Wilson, Carol Y. / Tiede, Mark K. (2003): "Acoustic strategies for production of American English "retroflex" /r/", In ICPhS-15, 1125-1128.