Dear Phonet people

So far I've had two replies to my query - from Jim Scobbie and Jane 
Stuart-Smith - and both included caveats along the lines of this from Jim:

> My guess is that this distinction between estuary and scottish versions of
> the vowel in "good" is too complex for an MSc to make a lot of headway
> unless some basic background work is done. The vowel will be very variable
> in both accent types, and though there still may be a simple acoustic
> relationship between formants and perceived Scottishness that can be found,
> what would that tell you, if you find it?

So I should clarify, in case anyone else wants to respond, that I am NOT 
interested in directly comparing Scottish and Estuary English renditions 
of _good_.  I was only using those as examples of the kind of vowels I'm 
interested in.

To answer Jim's further question: what I'm aiming at is, for Scottish 
English, something like Labov's index of "Philadelphian-ness" based on the 
acoustic realization of specific vowel phonemes. The basic idea is to 
explore the Labovian distinction between lexical set membership and 
phonetic realization (in order to have authentically Philadelphian lexical 
sets for _bad, glad, sad_ etc., you have to have Philadelphia-native 
parents, but in order to sound Philadelphian you just have to modify the 
phonetic realization of _caught_).  We want to compare Scottish speakers' 
lexical set intuitions with their acoustic realizations of certain 
phonemes.

I think that the frontness of /u/ would be a useful thing to measure in 
this theoretical context (along with the backness of /a/, the shortness of 
/i/ and /u/ before nasals and voiced stops, etc.), and what I was asking 
about in my original query was simply how to distinguish, in acoustic 
space, between "barred U" (which should sound "Scottish") and "barred I" 
(which shouldn't).  It was a very practical question, and I'm sorry I 
gummed it up by dragging Estuary English into it.  Can anyone help me now?

Thanks

Bob Ladd


PS: Jim adds

> And what sort of judgement task is
> the right one for this sort of study? I think this needs to be clear to
> start with, and think that a strong methodological and descriptive angle
> would be really useful for other researchers.

If we find anything useful out, I'll be sure to let everyone know later in 
the summer.