"Patterns of /r/ gemination in British and American English: A comparative study"
Résumé
This paper presents a large study of the realisation of /r/ at the prefix-base boundary in words beginning with the orthographic sequence (e.g. irrational, irremovable) using speech data. We are interested in whether there is a difference between American English and British English regarding the possibility of having geminated /r/ in such structures, as reported by pronunciation dictionaries, and in evaluating whether the predictors that affect the duration of [ɹ] in those words are the same as those reported in the literature regarding other consonants in comparable configurations. We report several linear regression analyses showing that there is indeed a difference between those two varieties of English, but that it is not a categorical difference. We replicate observations made on other consonants, with shorter [ɹ] durations in high-frequency words and when the following syllable is unstressed. We report mixed results regarding different measures of segmentability, semantic transparency being consistent with the ‘segmentability hypothesis’, but frequency measures being consistent with cumulative frequency-driven reduction. We unexpectedly find that, even though it is not part of the base, [ɪ] is shorter if the base is more frequent. We also report a new result, as we find that male speakers overall produce longer [ɹ]s than female speakers.