Acoustic Strategies for Production of American English "retroflex" /r

The variety of articulatory configurations used for American English rhotic liquids suggests that speakers used different articulatory strategies to achieve similar acoustic goals. In this paper, we focus on a variant of this liquid produced with strong retroflexion of the tongue tip and no sublingual space. Previous models of "bunched" articulatory configurations and less extreme "retroflex" versions of /r/ have ascribed the F3 resonance to the front cavity. In this paper, we propose that speakers who use the extreme retroflex version of /r/ have switched the cavity affiliation of F3 to the back cavity.