Contextual-coarticulatory inconsistency of /r/ misarticulation.

Ten children who misarticulated /r/ participated in a task designed to survey inconsistent misarticulatory behavior. Children repeated 51 sentences during each of three trials. All sentences contained a single occurrence of an allophone of /r/ in systematically permuted, lexically constrained (LC) or nonlexically constrained (NLC) CrV contexts or nonlexically constrained (NLC) contexts. Results suggested that reliable judgment procedures were employed and that a high degree of internal consistency was present for the sentence repetition task. All children demonstrated inconsistent misarticulation of the target phonemes. Target allophones, in order of least to more often correctly produced, were (NCL) [r], (LC) [r], and (NLC). Correct production of [r] within NLC contexts occurred more frequently when preceded by /k/ and when followed by the vowels /i/, /ae/, and /u/. The target allophone [r] in LC clusters was produced correctly more often within /k/ and /t/ contexts than in /p/ contexts. Vocalic was produced correctly more often within and contexts than when in others in which /k/, /n/, /t/, and /p/ were permuted. Data suggest that certain anticipatory and carry-over coarticulatory variables result in positive influences during inconsistent misarticulatory behavior.