An Articulatory Analysis of American English Rhotics in Children With and Without a History of Residual Speech Sound Disorder

Purpose: This study investigated articulatory patterns for American English /ɹ/in children with and without a history of residual speech sound disorder (RSSD). It was hypothesized that children without RSSD would favor bunched tongue shapes, similar to American adults reported in previous literature. Based on clini-cal cueing practices, it was hypothesized that children with RSSD might produce retroflex tongue shape patterns at a higher relative rate. Finally, it was hypothe-sized that, among children who use a mixture of bunched and retroflex shapes, phonetic context would impact tongue shape as reported in the adult literature. Method: These hypotheses were tested using ultrasound data from a stimul-ability task eliciting /ɹ/ in syllabic, postvocalic, and onset contexts. Participants were two groups of children/adolescents aged 9–15 years: 36 with RSSD who completed a study of ultrasound biofeedback treatment and 33 with no history of RSSD. Tongue shapes were qualitatively coded as bunched or retroflex using a flowchart from previous research. Results: Children with no history of RSSD were found to use bunched-only ton-gue shape patterns at a rate higher than adults, but those who used a mixture of shapes for /ɹ/ followed the expected phonetic contextual patterning. Children with RSSD were found to use retroflex-only patterns at a substantially higher rate than adults, and those using a mixture of shapes did not exhibit the expected patterning by phonetic context. Conclusions: These findings suggest that clients receiving ultrasound biofeed-back treatment for /ɹ/ may be most responsive to clinician cueing of retroflex shapes, at least early on. However, retroflex-only cueing may be a limiting and insufficient strategy, particularly in light of our finding of a lack of typical varia-tion across phonetic contexts in children with remediated /ɹ/. Future research should more specifically track cueing strategies to better understand the rela-tionship between clinician cues, tongue shapes, and generalization across a range of contexts.