r-deletion in Dutch : rumours or reality?
Henk van den Heuvel, Catia Cucchiarini · 2001
In this study we investigate three properties of the left vowel context which we hypothesize to underlie deletion of /r/ in postvocalic, preconsonantal position in Dutch spontaneous speech: vowel type (schwa, full vowel), vowel length (long, short) and lexical stress (+,-). For each of five categories 90 instances with possible /r/-realizations were extracted from a large speech database containing man-machine dialogues in an automatic train timetable inquiry system. The frequency of /r/-deletions in these 450 cases was investigated on the basis of variant selection by a CSR and human transcriptions of the same material. Loglinear analyses revealed that /r/-deletion was significantly more frequent after schwa than after full vowels, and that the effect of vowel length and lexical stress was not significant. This appeared from both the CSR data and the human transcriptions. Discrepancies between the two sets of results were observed, too. Possible explanations are discussed. 1.