Acquiring rhoticity across languages: An ultrasound study of differentiating tongue movements

Rhotics in many languages develop late and show clinically significant misarticulations. The English approximant and Spanish trill rhotics exhibit both a primary constriction along the palate and a secondary constriction in the pharynx. We speculate that the secondary constriction might be a cross-linguistic characteristic of rhotics and thus potentially a factor in delayed articulatory development/misarticulations. We describe an exploratory study analyzing rhotic tongue configurations in ultrasound videos from a small sample of native adult speakers of English, Malayalam, French, Persian and Spanish. Our findings confirm that rhotic sounds most subject to late development also involve tongue root movement towards a pharyngeal constriction, but this conclusion must remain tentative without further research. In the meantime, clinical strategies that include attention to primary and secondary constrictions should be explored for remediation of rhotic misarticulations across languages.