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Hi Bob, 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? And what sort of judgement task is the tight 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. As we all tend to do, you define /u/ variation in articulatory parameters of fronting and rounding, while asking for acoustic correlates of the difference, because formants are what are easiest to use to quantify it. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of articulatory variation, and acoustic variation too, and as a first step I would look at one or the other, but not both. So, acoustics only. However, I think /u/ is central-to-front, not sure about how often it is more than mid rounded, and I think it will be mid-close, often no higher than /o/. Acoustically, it's worth looking at the variation studies that are out there. There is a paper on OUT (Eremeeva, V. and Stuart-Smith, J. (2003), 'A sociophonetic investigation of the vowels OUT and BIT in Glaswegian', Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona, 1205-8) which may have something to say about the acoustics of the monophthongal variant of the OUT vowel. Pretty sure Jane has lots of info on /u/, maybe not in that paper though. My laptop has become desychronised to my work files, or I could tell you what the values I have for /u/ are from Jane's data. Oh - here they some - in Scobbie, James M., Alice Turk & Nigel Hewlett (1999) Morphemes, Phonetics and Lexical Items: The Case of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule. Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Volume 2:1617-1620 http://www.qmuc.ac.uk/ssrc/pubs/scob991.pdf Age-sex group: F1 - F2 Younger F: 445 - 1977 Younger M: 412 - 1787 Older F: 370 - 1764 Older M: 345 - 1567 Sadly - no F3. Bad me. I will have social variation results for these at work, but I don't think I measured F3, and it was in my pre-PRAAT days, so I can't just ask the data. Damn. Are you using synthesised vowels - in which case you could look at an acoustic cue directly, or real tokens? If real tokens, there will be lots of other things present which might cue Scottishness too: voice quality, intonation, duration etc. There is an IRN BRU 32 advert at the moment with an interesting /u/ vowel, very good example of one of the broad Scots-influenced variants you hear. It features a hardman cuckoo. This variant is a central but not too high /u/. And this is not merely a variant, but a variant selected for a media campaign as being stereotypical for a subtype of Scottishness. http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/e_article000591518.cfm?x=b11,0,w VERY quick and dirty measurement gives F1 400Hz, F2 1500Hz, F3 2500Hz-2700Hz. the adult male cuckoo fits the average adult male profile for glasgow /u/ fairly well, with a little higher F1 and similar F2. Jim Scobbie -----Original Message----- From: D R Ladd To: [log in to unmask] Sent: 16/06/2006 16:03 Subject: acoustic distsinction between barred I and barred U Dear Phonet people, For an MSc summer dissertation project I am supervising, I'm looking for a quick-and-dirty acoustic parameter that will distinguish a Scottish realisation of the vowel of _good_ (conventionally transcribed with IPA barred U) from a more "Estuary English" - fronter than IPA /u/ and less rounded - version of the same vowel (for which I would be tempted to use IPA barred I). I thought that the difference between F3 and F2 might work (I presume the two would be closer together in barred U than barred I), but does anyone have any other ideas? I'm looking for a single parameter that I can correlate with judgements of "Scottishness". (I mean, a single parameter for this particular vowel quality - I'm looking at other features of Scottish speech as well measures as well). Thanks. Bob Ladd