About this activity
Fourteen Spanish words with the single tap r between vowels: pera, aro, toro, cara, oreja, arena, dinero, cereza, mariposa, tijeras, sombrero, enero, camarón, naranja. The tap is a brief single contact rather than a trill, and it is the more frequent of the two Spanish r sounds by a wide margin.
How to use it in a session
Contrast it with the English /d/ if the student is bilingual, since the Spanish tap and the American English flap in butter are nearly the same sound — a student who says butter has already made this sound in another language. Do the short words first: pera, aro, toro, cara. Mariposa and camarón are four syllables and put the target in the middle, which is the hardest configuration here. Eight minutes covers a subset.
What to listen for
Listen for a trill where a tap belongs, which is over-application and produces carro for caro — a different word. Watch the four-syllable words, where the tap is in an unstressed syllable and often disappears entirely rather than being substituted.
Carrying it home
Pera, cara, dinero and naranja are everyday words. Asking a family to notice one word rather than the sound in general is a task they can actually keep up with.
Questions
- Is this activity in Spanish?
- Yes, all fourteen words are Spanish. The page is in English so an English-speaking clinician can find and evaluate it.
- Is it free?
- Yes, no account needed.
- How is this different from the trill?
- The tap is a single brief contact and the trill is several. They distinguish words in Spanish — caro and carro are different — so they are separate targets rather than variations.