Can You Learn To Roll Your Rs? | IFLScience We Have Questions

My name is Laura, and I have a confession to make: I cannot roll my Rs. Now, as a native speaker of English, you might not think this would majorly impact my life. But I’ve also been a student of Spanish since the age of 12, and the rolled R sound? Well, it comes up a lot.

After all these years, I’d basically written off my chances of learning to produce this elusive sound, but a chance conversation fanned the flames of curiosity once again. So, I spoke to Dr Helen Nuttall, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience and head of the Neuroscience of Speech and Action Lab at Lancaster University, to talk all things speech production – and just maybe, keep my dreams of Spanish mastery alive.