Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Sep;130(3):1643-52. doi: 10.1121/1.3619793.
In sequences such as law and order, speakers of British English often insert /r/ between law and and. Acoustic analyses revealed such "intrusive" /r/ to be significantly shorter than canonical /r/. In a 2AFC experiment, native listeners heard British English sentences in which /r/ duration was manipulated across a word boundary [e.g., saw (r)ice], and orthographic and semantic factors were varied. These listeners responded categorically on the basis of acoustic evidence for /r/ alone, reporting ice after short /r/s, rice after long /r/s; orthographic and semantic factors had no effect. Dutch listeners proficient in English who heard the same materials relied less on durational cues than the native listeners, and were affected by both orthography and semantic bias. American English listeners produced intermediate responses to the same materials, being sensitive to duration (less so than native, more so than Dutch listeners), and to orthography (less so than the Dutch), but insensitive to the semantic manipulation. Listeners from language communities without common use of intrusive /r/ may thus interpret intrusive /r/ as canonical /r/, with a language difference increasing this propensity more than a dialect difference. Native listeners, however, efficiently distinguish intrusive from canonical /r/ by exploiting the relevant acoustic variation.
在像“法律与秩序”（Law and Order）这样的序列中，英式英语使用者通常会在 law 和 and 之间插入 /r/。声学分析显示，这种“侵入性”的 /r/比标准的 /r/明显短。在一个 2AFC 实验中，母语为英语的听众听到了英语句子，其中 /r/ 的持续时间在词边界上发生了变化[例如，saw (r)ice]，同时还改变了拼写法和语义因素。这些听众仅根据 /r/ 的声学证据进行了分类反应，在短 /r/ 后报告 ice，在长 /r/ 后报告 rice；拼写法和语义因素没有影响。熟练掌握英语的荷兰听众比母语听众更依赖于时长线索，并且受到拼写法和语义偏差的影响。美国英语听众对相同的材料产生了中间反应，对时长敏感（比母语听众敏感程度低，比荷兰听众敏感程度高），对拼写法也敏感（比荷兰听众敏感程度低），但对语义操作不敏感。因此，没有共同使用侵入性 /r/ 的语言社区的听众可能会将侵入性 /r/解释为标准的 /r/，而语言差异比方言差异更能增加这种倾向。然而，母语听众通过利用相关的声学变化，能够有效地将侵入性 /r/与标准 /r/区分开来。
