# Variation in trilling: phonetic realizations of /r/ and / //

Rémi Anselme

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# Variation in trilling: phonetic realizations of /r/ and / //

Rémi Anselme

► To cite this version:

Rémi Anselme. Variation in trilling: phonetic realizations of /r/ and / // . ConSOLE 30 - Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe, Jan 2021, Online, France. hal-04577617

HAL Id: hal-04577617

https://hal.science/hal-04577617v1

Submitted on 16 May 2024

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# Variation in trilling: Phonetic realizations of /r/ and /l/

Rémi Anselme¹

¹Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR 5596 - Université Lumière Lyon 2

Université
Lumière
Lyon 2

LABORATOIRE
DYNAMIQUE
DU
LANGAGE

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Distribution of languages with an alveolar trill and an alveolar tap based on PHOIBLE database (Moran & McCloy, 2019)</figcaption></figure>

* **Alveolar trills** and **alveolar taps** and two possible sounds found among languages around the world. The alveolar trill [r] has been well characterized in the literature both from an articulatory point of view. It is often described as a sound where "the tongue tip is made to **vibrate** against [...] the alveolar ridge" (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996). The phoneme /r/ if often described as complex (Solé, 1998) and it is one of the latest sounds to be acquired (McLeod & Crowe, 2018).
* The alveolar tap [r], often associated with the [r], is a sound made when "[...] moving the active articulator directly towards the roof of the mouth" (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996).

* From a typological point of view, it is easy to obtain distributions as well as frequencies of the two phonemes thanks to many databases like PHOIBLE (Moran & McCloy, 2019) or UPSID (Maddieson, 1984). Nevertheless it has been stated that "an actual trill realization of an /r/ is not as common as might be expected from descriptions of languages, where an /r/ is often labeled as a "trill."" (Lindau, 1985, p.161) and "the data collected for UPSID suggest either that trills are not in fact particularly rare or that very many erroneous reports of trills occur in the literature" (Maddieson, 1984, p.89).

* It is therefore legitimate to ask the following questions with quantitative data: How /r/ and /c/ are produced crosslinguistically? Which allophones are found for the two phonemes? How rare is the [r] (i.e. trilling articulation)?

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Spectrograms of an alveolar trill [r] (upper panel) and of an alveolar tap [r] (lower panel) - Recordings from two Spanish speakers pronouncing /pero/ and /pero/</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Methodology

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

* Illustrations of the IPA whose purpose is to highlight the segmental phonetics and phonology of various languages, dialects through the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

* Our corpus is composed of 78 recordings of a narrative attached to the articles (about ~1min each) (one recording = one speaker ≠ one language)

* In most of the cases it was the fable "The North Wind and the Sun" who is also phonetically and/or phonemically transcribed in the article

* We had a step of data curation of descriptive label used by the linguists (for better comparability of the articles)

* Segmentation was done in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2001)

* We annotated for four kind of coronal allophones:

1. Tapped phones

2. Trilled phones

3. Approximant phones

4. Fricative phones

* Data analysis (of 1625 occurrences (tokens) from which 993 were tapped or trilled) was done in R using RStudio interface (R Core Team, 2020)

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

R Studio®

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Count of the trilled and tapped allophones for phonemic trill /r/ (on the right) and the tap /r/ for each speaker (with the glottcode associated) included.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Duration of [r] and [c] based on if they are allophones of /r/ or /c/. In both condition trills are longer than taps (t(92.733) = 20.511, p<0.01)</figcaption></figure>

* There is inter- and intra-individual variation

* Inter-recording variation is characterized by a tendency for a trade-off between taps and approximants

* Intra-recording variation is characterized by a tendency to have several allophones (and not just one). Some authors of the illustrations mention an effect of the phonological context (we have only preliminary results for the moment)

* Overlap in phonetic realizations (including languages where there is a trill/tap contrast [16 languages in our sample])

* Trilling is relatively more frequent in /r/ than in /c/ (and more frequent when there is a contrast with a /c/)

* We found that phonetic trills are longer than taps (Fig. 4), and that phonemic trills are longer than phonemic tap (after data duration and including all the variants) (t(1006.3)=8.7662, p<0.01)

<table><caption>Tab. 1. Counts of the different allophones of the phonemic trill and the phonemic tap in the recordings (no distinction between languages with and without a trill/tap contrast).</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Trill.allophone</th><th>Tap. allophone</th><th>Fric. allophone</th><th>App. allophone</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>/r/</td><td>99 (16%)</td><td>300 (47%)</td><td>22 (3%)</td><td>212 (34%)</td></tr><tr><td>/c/</td><td>37 (4%)</td><td>557 (56%)</td><td>29 (3%)</td><td>339 (37%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. Average frequencies of the different allophones for the phonemic trill and tap based on the presence of trill/tap contrast in the language/dialect.</figcaption></figure>

* “speakers that do [trill], have tap and approximant allophones as well as the trill” (Lindau, 1985, p.161).

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6. Graph of relationships between the different allophones studied in our investigation. Tap is associated with frequency and trill with saliency. Many authors of the Illustrations of the IPA have specified that trills are found mostly in emphatic speech or when speakers have a careful pronunciation.</figcaption></figure>

## Primacy of the tap over the trill?

“A reverse directionality (of trills originating as stylistic variants of taps in strong positions) is not implausible” (Sebregts, 2014, p.179)

Our results are in line with other studies on rhotic variation where trilling is not as frequent as it could be expected (Blecua, 2002; Henriksen, 2015; Bradley, 2012; Vigil, 2018; Zahler and Daidone, 2014; Sebregts, 2015; Rennicke, 2015; Jauriberry, 2016; Stuart-Smith et al. 2014; Romano, 2013; Magnuson, 2008; Rafat, 2010)

## Limits:

We only analyzed narrative recordings but some recordings of word lists are also available and could be included for further analysis.

We only annotated for four allophones while some studies on rhotics variation have annotated more than 15 variants (Sebregts, 2014, Rennicke, 2015)

## Preliminary results on context:

* Our preliminary results on the context show that the first phonological context where we find trilling the most is intervocalic position.

* Trilling (in comparition with tapping) is found relatively more in word initial (followed by a vowel) and word final position (preceded by a vowel), and before a sonorant.

* Our preliminary results also show that trilling is disfavored when following an obstruent.

Discussion

* All the authors of Illustrations of the IPA for their work used in this study.
* The ConSOLE 30 organizers and the two anonymous reviewers of the abstract.
* My thesis supervisors Dan Dediu and François Pellegrino.
* IDEXLyon Fellowship Grant No. 16-IDEX0005 (2018-2021)
* Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR 5596

Blecua, B. (2002). Las vibrantes del español: Manifestaciones acústicas y procesos fonéticos. Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2001). PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot international, 5, 341-345. Bradley, T. G. (2012). Rhotic variation and constrast in Veracruz Mexican Spanish. 31. Henriksen, N. (2015). Acoustic analysis of the rhotic contrast in Chicagoland Spanish: An intergenerational study. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 5(3), 285-321. Jauriberry, T. (2016). Rhotiques et rhoticités en Écosse: Une étude sociophonétique de l'anglais écossais standard. Lindau, M. (1985). The Story of /r/. In V. A. Fromkin (Éd.), Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter Ladefoged (p. 260). Academic Press Inc. Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge University Press. Magnuson, T. J. (2008). What /r/ Sounds Like in Kansai Japanese: A Phonetic Investigation of Liquid Variation in Unscripted Discourse. McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children's Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(4), 1546-1571. Moran, S., & McCloy, D. (Éds.). (2019). PHOIBLE 2.0. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Manual]. Rafat, Y. (2015). The interaction of acoustic and orthographic input in the acquisition of Spanish assibilated/fricative rhotics. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36(1), 43-66. Rennicke, I. (2015). Variation and Change in the Rhotics of Brazilian Portuguese. Romano, A. 2013. A preliminary contribution to the study of phonetic variation of /r/ in Italian and Italian-Romance. In Vietti, A. & L. Spreafico (eds.), Rhotics. New Data and Perspectives, Bozen Bolzano: Bozen Bolzano University Press. 209-226. Sebregts, K. D. C. J. (2014). The Sociophonetics and Phonology of Dutch r. LOT, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics. Solé, M.-J. (2002). Aerodynamic characteristics of trills and phonological patterning. Journal of Phonetics, 30(4), 655-688. Stuart-Smith, J., Lawson, E., & Scobbie, J. M. (2014). Derhoticisation in Scottish English. In Advances in sociophonetics (Vol. 15, p. 59). John Benjamins Amsterdam. Vigil, D. A. (2018). Rhotics of Taos, New Mexico Spanish: Variation and Change. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone
# Variation in trilling: Phonetic realizations of /r/ and /r/

Rémi Anselme¹

¹Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR 5596 - Université Lumière Lyon 2

Université
Lumière
Lyon 2

LABORATOIRE
DYNAMIQUE
DU
LANGAGE

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Distribution of languages with an alveolar trill and an alveolar tap based on PHOIBLE database (Moran & McCloy, 2019)</figcaption></figure>

* **Alveolar trills** and **alveolar taps** and two possible sounds found among languages around the world. The alveolar trill [r] has been well characterized in the literature both from an articulatory point of view. It is often described as a sound where "the tongue tip is made to **vibrate** against [...] the alveolar ridge" (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996). The phoneme /r/ if often described as complex (Solé, 1998) and it is one of the latest sounds to be acquired (McLeod & Crowe, 2018).
* The alveolar tap [r], often associated with the [r], is a sound made when "[...] moving the active articulator directly towards the roof of the mouth" (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996).

* From a typological point of view, it is easy to obtain distributions as well as frequencies of the two phonemes thanks to many databases like PHOIBLE (Moran & McCloy, 2019) or UPSID (Maddieson, 1984). Nevertheless it has been stated that "an actual trill realization of an /r/ is not as common as might be expected from descriptions of languages, where an /r/ is often labeled as a "trill."" (Lindau, 1985, p.161) and "the data collected for UPSID suggest either that trills are not in fact particularly rare or that very many erroneous reports of trills occur in the literature" (Maddieson, 1984, p.89).

* It is therefore legitimate to ask the following questions with quantitative data: How /r/ and /c/ are produced crosslinguistically? Which allophones are found for the two phonemes? How rare is the [r] (i.e. trilling articulation)?

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Spectrograms of an alveolar trill [r] (upper panel) and of an alveolar tap [r] (lower panel) - Recordings from two Spanish speakers pronouncing /pero/ and /pero/</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Methodology

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

* Illustrations of the IPA whose purpose is to highlight the segmental phonetics and phonology of various languages, dialects through the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

* Our corpus is composed of 78 recordings of a narrative attached to the articles (about ~1min each) (one recording = one speaker ≠ one language)

* In most of the cases it was the fable "The North Wind and the Sun" who is also phonetically and/or phonemically transcribed in the article

* We had a step of data curation of descriptive label used by the linguists (for better comparability of the articles)

* Segmentation was done in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2001)

* We annotated for four kind of coronal allophones:

1. Tapped phones

2. Trilled phones

3. Approximant phones

4. Fricative phones

* Data analysis (of 1625 occurrences (tokens) from which 993 were tapped or trilled) was done in R using RStudio interface (R Core Team, 2020)

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

R Studio®

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Count of the trilled and tapped allophones for phonemic trill /r/ (on the right) and the tap /r/ for each speaker (with the glottcode associated) included.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Duration of [r] and [c] based on if they are allophones of /r/ or /c/. In both condition trills are longer than taps (t(92.733) = 20.511, p<0.01)</figcaption></figure>

* There is inter- and intra-individual variation

* Inter-recording variation is characterized by a tendency for a trade-off between taps and approximants

* Intra-recording variation is characterized by a tendency to have several allophones (and not just one). Some authors of the illustrations mention an effect of the phonological context (we have only preliminary results for the moment)

* Overlap in phonetic realizations (including languages where there is a trill/tap contrast [16 languages in our sample])

* Trilling is relatively more frequent in /r/ than in /c/ (and more frequent when there is a contrast with a /c/)

* We found that phonetic trills are longer than taps (Fig. 4), and that phonemic trills are longer than phonemic tap (after data duration and including all the variants) (t(1006.3)=8.7662, p<0.01)

<table><caption>Tab. 1. Counts of the different allophones of the phonemic trill and the phonemic tap in the recordings (no distinction between languages with and without a trill/tap contrast).</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Trill.allophone</th><th>Tap. allophone</th><th>Fric. allophone</th><th>App. allophone</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>/r/</td><td>99 (16%)</td><td>300 (47%)</td><td>22 (3%)</td><td>212 (34%)</td></tr><tr><td>/c/</td><td>37 (4%)</td><td>557 (56%)</td><td>29 (3%)</td><td>339 (37%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. Average frequencies of the different allophones for the phonemic trill and tap based on the presence of trill/tap contrast in the language/dialect.</figcaption></figure>

* “speakers that do [trill], have tap and approximant allophones as well as the trill” (Lindau, 1985, p.161).

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 6. Graph of relationships between the different allophones studied in our investigation. Tap is associated with frequency and trill with saliency. Many authors of the Illustrations of the IPA have specified that trills are found mostly in emphatic speech or when speakers have a careful pronunciation.</figcaption></figure>

## Primacy of the tap over the trill?

“A reverse directionality (of trills originating as stylistic variants of taps in strong positions) is not implausible” (Sebregts, 2014, p.179)

Our results are in line with other studies on rhotic variation where trilling is not as frequent as it could be expected (Blecua, 2002; Henriksen, 2015; Bradley, 2012; Vigil, 2018; Zahler and Daidone, 2014; Sebregts, 2015; Rennicke, 2015; Jauriberry, 2016; Stuart-Smith et al. 2014; Romano, 2013; Magnuson, 2008; Rafat, 2010)

## Limits:

We only analyzed narrative recordings but some recordings of word lists are also available and could be included for further analysis.

We only annotated for four allophones while some studies on rhotics variation have annotated more than 15 variants (Sebregts, 2014, Rennicke, 2015)

## Preliminary results on context:

* Our preliminary results on the context show that the first phonological context where we find trilling the most is intervocalic position.

* Trilling (in comparition with tapping) is found relatively more in word initial (followed by a vowel) and word final position (preceded by a vowel), and before a sonorant.

* Our preliminary results also show that trilling is disfavored when following an obstruent.

Discussion

* All the authors of Illustrations of the IPA for their work used in this study.
* The ConSOLE 30 organizers and the two anonymous reviewers of the abstract.
* My thesis supervisors Dan Dediu and François Pellegrino.
* IDEXLyon Fellowship Grant No. 16-IDEX0005 (2018-2021)
* Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage UMR 5596

Blecua, B. (2002). Las vibrantes del español: Manifestaciones acústicas y procesos fonéticos. Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2001). PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot international, 5, 341-345. Bradley, T. G. (2012). Rhotic variation and constrast in Veracruz Mexican Spanish. 31. Henriksen, N. (2015). Acoustic analysis of the rhotic contrast in Chicagoland Spanish: An intergenerational study. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 5(3), 285-321. Jauriberry, T. (2016). Rhotiques et rhoticités en Écosse: Une étude sociophonétique de l'anglais écossais standard. Lindau, M. (1985). The Story of /r/. In V. A. Fromkin (Éd.), Phonetic Linguistics: Essays in Honor of Peter Ladefoged (p. 260). Academic Press Inc. Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge University Press. Magnuson, T. J. (2008). What /r/ Sounds Like in Kansai Japanese: A Phonetic Investigation of Liquid Variation in Unscripted Discourse. McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children's Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(4), 1546-1571. Moran, S., & McCloy, D. (Éds.). (2019). PHOIBLE 2.0. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Manual]. Rafat, Y. (2015). The interaction of acoustic and orthographic input in the acquisition of Spanish assibilated/fricative rhotics. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36(1), 43-66. Rennicke, I. (2015). Variation and Change in the Rhotics of Brazilian Portuguese. Romano, A. 2013. A preliminary contribution to the study of phonetic variation of /r/ in Italian and Italian-Romance. In Vietti, A. & L. Spreafico (eds.), Rhotics. New Data and Perspectives, Bozen Bolzano: Bozen Bolzano University Press. 209-226. Sebregts, K. D. C. J. (2014). The Sociophonetics and Phonology of Dutch r. LOT, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics. Solé, M.-J. (2002). Aerodynamic characteristics of trills and phonological patterning. Journal of Phonetics, 30(4), 655-688. Stuart-Smith, J., Lawson, E., & Scobbie, J. M. (2014). Derhoticisation in Scottish English. In Advances in sociophonetics (Vol. 15, p. 59). John Benjamins Amsterdam. Vigil, D. A. (2018). Rhotics of Taos, New Mexico Spanish: Variation and Change. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone