Anticipatory planning of r-insertion in Australian English

In non-rhotic Australian English, glottalization and ‘r’ insertion are strategies used to separate contiguous heterosyllabic vowels (hiatus). This study examined hiatus breaking strategies to determine whether realisation and incidence differed as a function of prosodic context. We were also interested in whether inserted ‘r’ exhibited pre-planning. In an elicited production task, 14 non-rhotic Australian English speakers produced sentences containing two types of coda-less monosyllabic target noun (e.g. paw - containing no orthographic ‘r’, and door - containing orthographic ‘r’). These were followed by an onset-less preposition (of, under, above) (e.g., ‘This is the paw of the dog’). The incidence of inserted ‘r’ did not vary significantly across prosodically controlled but orthographically different contexts. However, the nature of the following preposition affected the choice of ‘r’ vs. glottalization. Importantly, for those speakers who produced auditorily identified ‘r’, we observed anticipatory F3 lowering in the vowel preceding inserted ‘r’ indicating non-local planning.