Abstract
The study reported in this paper deals with the acoustic characteristics of initial, final, medial, and syllabic allophones of /r/ in Midwestern American English. The description is based on a spectrographic analysis of 136 frame sentences, spoken by five informants. Some of the reciprocal influences between the positional variants of the /r/ phoneme and the preceding and following sounds are described. The possibility of identifying the syllable nucleus [ɝ] with one of the phonetic variants of /r/ is considered. It appears that certain of the allophones of /r/ have relatively stable formant patterns and that it is possible to associate those allophones with the boundaries of larger phonological units.
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