The obstruentised rhotic of Polish: An acoustic study

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study aimed at establishing the acoustic characteristics of the obstruentised rhotic of Polish, i.e. an r-sound that is neither adjacent to a vowel nor syllabic. The study has revealed that the physical realisation of the sound is dependent on the position it occupies within the syllable as well as on the manner of articulation of the following segment. In onset positions, the obstruentised rhotic is likely to be articulated as a trill when followed by a stop. In contrast, spirantised variants are common in those clusters where the rhotic precedes a fricative. In prosodically weak coda positions, the degree of phonetic reduction is greater than in the onset. The observed variants include voiceless trills, spirantised rhotics, affricated rhotics, taps and instances of deletion.