Introduction

Specifically, the phonetic reality of cross-speaker variation in the production of fricatives articulated with the tip-blade appears to be rather puzzling. It is known that 50% of Californian English speakers produce [s] as an apical sound and 50% as a laminal one. The same distribution applies to Ul. Dart (1991) has also shown that the place of articulation of rs] in both English and French varies considerably from speaker to speaker, being articulated with a constriction that varies from as far forward as the dental zone to as far back as the post-alveolar zone. Apical or laminal, dental, alveolar or post-alveolar [s] always sounds like an [s] to the ears of English speakers.