The role of anterior lingual gesture delay in coda /r/ lenition: An ultrasound tongue imaging study

Abstract

We investigate the contribution that lingual gesture delay makes to lenition of postvocalic /r/. This study uses a socially-stratified, audio-ultrasound corpus of Scottish English containing recordings from two sociolects; one with postvocalic /r/ weakening and the other with strengthening. We quantify auditory strength of rhoticity and the timing of the anterior lingual gesture relative to the offset of voicing in CVr words: bar, bore, fur, or onset of a following consonant in CVrC words: farm, herb, burp, in order to show that there is a statistically significant correlation between weak rhoticity and a late articulatory gesture. Our ultrasound data also show that during the process of final consonant vocalization/deletion, underlying articulatory gestures may persist.