r-deletion in Dutch : rumours or reality?

The As. study r-deletion in postvocalic, preconsonantal position in Dutch spontaneous speech. They investigate three properties of the left vowel context: vowel type (schwa, full vowel), vowel length (long, short) and lexical stress (+/-). Instances with possible realisations of (r) 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 (Continuous Speech Recogniser) and human transcription of the same material. Deletion of (r) was significantly more frequent after schwa than after full vowels; the effects of vowel length and lexical stress were not significant. This appeared from both the CSR data and the human transcriptions. Discrepancies between the two sets of results were observed, too, which is interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view as well