conuly

LOL, okay, let me see if I can break it down. I'm hampered because I don't remember the descriptors for the parts or muscles of the mouth, nor the terms to describe the parts of phonemes, so this will be a sketchy and imprecise explanation, but here goes:

When I go to say road-race, the muscle under my jaw moves the inner edge of my lower lip toward the edge of my upper front teeth. The lip doesn't necessarily touch the teeth, but it does flatten and evert slightly as if it was going to, even when it doesn't. Most of the sound is made at the back of the throat, though, and shaped by the muscle at the base of the tongue.

It's that same muscle that makes the r- sounds in car-door. I do pronounce all my r-s, but I don't hit them very hard when they come at the end of a word. Even so, they're much more from the back of the mouth than from the front, which is probably why they don't get blended with my t-s, since those come from the tongue and the palate.

Hope that makes some kind of sense!