Stylistic Variation in Misarticulations
Martin J. Ball, Orla Lowry, Lisa McInnis · 2021
This chapter examines a case of r-misarticulation and the range of variants that the clients uses for target /r/, and the styles in which they occur. It describes a case-study of a child with unusual realizations of target /r/, which seemed to co-vary with distribution in the word, and style of utterance. The client “Robert” was 9.8 at the time of recording, and he had received speech therapy since he was 3-years-old for a variety of articulation problems. His target accent was west Louisiana, which is rhotic and similar in many respects to eastern Texas. His main remaining articulation problem was reported to be with /r/. Robert&s;s realizations of target /r/ during the reading of the Rainbow Passage were similar to those he used in the word list. In spontaneous speech, Robert generally used [ʋ] in prevocalic position, and deleted target /r/ in postvocalic position.