At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Massimo Lipari will present “/ɹ/ in 3 English dialects: Tongue shapes and formant dynamics.” We will be meeting this Wednesday, March 12, at 10 AM. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89609376104.
Abstract: English approximant /ɹ/ is famously subject to extensive articulatory variation, with tongue shapes traditionally grouped under two broad labels, ‘bunched’ and ‘retroflex’. These variants are often claimed to be indistinguishable perceptually and acoustically—though tongue shape appears to be socially salient in Scottish English. It has been suggested that at least in American English, bunched and retroflex rhotics differ in the higher formants: for instance, bunching results in higher F4 than retroflexion. This finding, however, is based on relatively few speakers. Given the complex, speaker-specific articulatory trading relationships which have been observed in English /ɹ/, which are argued to reduce acoustic variability between observations, it is unclear how well this result generalizes across speakers or across varieties of English. Indeed, the possibility of inter-dialect differences in /ɹ/ articulation and acoustics was first raised long ago, but has since received little attention. In this study, I investigate how the dynamics of F1–F4 in approximant syllabic/post-vocalic /ɹ/ vary (1) as a function of tongue shape and (2) across dialects of English, using audio recordings and ultrasound tongue imaging of 23 speakers (11 American, 9 Scottish, 3 Irish).