Error Patterns of Dorsal Rhotics: Evidence from Hebrew-Speaking Children

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper was to describe the error patterns of the dorsal rhotic /ʁ/ in the speech of typically developing Hebrew-speaking children and to examine the prosodic effect (i.e., position in the word and stress pattern) of its production. Method and Participants: The participants included 50 monolingual Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;6-3;3 years. The children performed an articulation task in which they were asked to articulate 18 disyllabic words composed of vowel-adjacent rhotics in initial, medial, and final word positions in both stressed and unstressed syllables. RESULTS: The results revealed that dorsal rhotics were produced correctly in 78.7% of the target words. The main error patterns were rhotic deletion and devoicing. There were fewer correct productions in initial word positions than in both medial and final word positions. No stress effect was found. In addition, 76% of the children produced the consonant correctly in over half of their productions. CONCLUSIONS: The result demonstrating a higher rate of errors in initial word positions may be due to the relatively late acquisition of the initial onset position in multisyllabic Hebrew words. Alternatively, this finding may result from the greater degree of allophonic variation found in this position. The finding that languages with dorsal rhotics have unique error patterns compared to other rhotics strengthens the evidence that rhotic error patterns are dependent on the rhotics' phonetic characteristics.