Why is "str" sometimes pronounced as "shtr"? [duplicate]
After digging for a while, I found the answer in a paper called Assimilation at a Distance by Wayne P. Lawrence.1 It's a little dated (2000), but also cites studies from 1993 and earlier describing this phenomenon.
The recent history of American English includes a sound change that seems to have gone unattested in the scholarly literature.1 This is the change of /s/ to /ʃ/ before /tr/ (i.e., a PHONEMIC CHANGE), which involves a palatalization of the initial sound in the cluster /str/, typically in initial position but not exclusively.
The author further mentions that "this phonemic change seems to be neither dialectal nor regional." However, it's definitely an American English peculiarity. It seems that it was first heard on television or radio broadcasts and became popular over these channels. Of course, the internet helps spreading such a linguistic "oddity" – and even I know I picked it up from television shows and continue to (subconciously) use this pronunciation.
Regarding the phonetic principles behind this change, Lawrence summarizes:
More concretely, this pronunciation is an implicit "assertion" on their part that in their grammar /r/, being [+ interrupted], is marked with respect to the opposition INTERRUPTED versus CONTINUOUS - exactly the same way that [ʃ], being [+ compact], is marked with respect to the opposition COMPACT versus DIFFUSE. The marked character of /r/ is prompted and confirmed phonetically, of course, by its high degree of retroflection in American English.7
This would explain the fact that we only hear this in American English. What's interesting is that the same does not appear to happen to "spr", which can be explained by the phonetic differences in "t" and "p":
I would surmise, therefore, that /str/ lends itself to realization as [ʃtr] while /spr/ remains unaltered also due to the phonological value of /t/ and /p/.
Another more recent paper was written by David Durian.2 It goes into the details of social background and "shtr" as well as providing some more explanations for its development.
1 – Lawrence, Wayne P. (2000) "Assimilation at a Distance," American Speech Vol. 75: Iss. 1: 82-87; doi:10.1215/00031283-75-1-82
2 – Durian, David (2007) "Getting [ʃ]tronger Every Day?: More on Urbanization and the Socio-geographic Diffusion of (str) in Columbus, OH," University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Vol. 13: Iss. 2, Article 6
The phenomenon has been studied by sociolinguists, beginning with Labov. This isn’t my area, so I can’t give you up-to-date references.
The same, or a similar, phenomenon is found in Sydney, Australia, where I grew up. I hasten to add though, the pronunciation isn’t /ʃtɹɛs/(*) , but /çtɹɛs/: i.e., a voiceless palatal fricative (as in German ich), not a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative (as in English wish).
There are certainly good articulatory foundations for this behaviour, along the lines you suggest, to do with preparing the tongue to produce sounds in the same (articulatory) vicinity. (For which reason, /s/ tends to be preserved in /spr/ and, especially, /skr/: the tongue does not stay near the alveolar ridge in these cases.)
Whether this is a “mistake” depends on how normative you are. The Queen doesn’t speak that way. If everything the Queen doesn’t do is a mistake, then this is too. Otherwise, it’s just another legitimate form of dialect variation.
(*) I assume your omission of /t/ here is accidental, given its non-omission in the title of the question.