A DIALECT STUDY OF AMERICAN R’S BY X-RAY MOTION PICTURE

The purpose of the present study is to make an exploratory description of the tongue positions for /r/ in the major dialects of American English, and to describe the acoustic correlates for these tongue positions. To make this description, we used the recently developed technique of eineradiography — X-ray sound moving pictures — with the facilities of the Speech Synthesis Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Our aim was to discover and describe most of the types of /r/ used in the United States, but we emphasize that the results of our limited sample are not intended to represent any general statement of the complete dialectal distribution of the types of /r/ which we discovered. Rather, our study is exploratory in nature, and is intended to show the manner in which these new techniques can be used to provide more finely discriminated and objective evidence for dialect studies. Our technical procedure will be described in detail later. We prepared a list of 32 common American English words containing /r/ in all the strong and weak syllabic positions. Using the cineradiographic facilities of the Speech Synthesis Project laboratory, we then took X-ray sound films and simultaneous magnetic tape-recordings of 46 informants from various parts of the United States pronouncing the words in random order, and made spectrograms from the tape-recordings. We then analyzed the films and spectrograms for articulatory and acoustic generalizations, and for possible correlations among the articulatory, acoustic, and auditory levels. Previous descriptions of American /r/ have suffered from vagueness and a lack of agreement. A forty-year-old criticism by John S. Kenyon