74 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
These two studies both show that derhoticisation is also taking place percep-
tually for members of the community, and is not only restricted to the domain of
the analyst. Both ends of the rhotic-derhotic continuum also still seem to carry
the kind of locally-salient social meanings that were proposed by Johnston for
Edinburgh. But if we want to pin down what listeners are responding to, it is clear
that we need to go further than the admittedly tricky auditory categorization. Our
next attempt was acoustic analysis.- The acoustic characteristics of derhoticising /r/
The difficulties with auditory percepts which were challenging to auditorily cat-
egorise, and themselves variable, motivated an acoustic analysis of the data whose
auditory transcription was discussed above in §4.1 (Stuart-Smith 2007). Since it
was also unclear whether the final outcome of derhoticisation to plain vowels is
leading to a merger (recall that weakened /r/ is now perceptually variable even to
Scottish listeners, §4.2), we included minimal pairs. To recap, we considered the
acoustics of coda /r/ in the following words: heart/hat, barn/ban, farm/fan and car,
far, card, in 12 working-class speakers, nine boys and three men.
We carried out a qualitative visual analysis of the spectrograms, and then used
a parametric analysis of acoustic properties of the syllable rime, so e.g. c-ar, follow-
ing the successful application of this method to variation in postvocalic /r/ in Dutch
(Plug & Odgen 2003). This also addresses the practical difficulties of segmenting
final /r/ consonants which were effectively no longer there. Using Praat, we labelled
the waveform for the beginning and end of the vocalic portion (i.e. the entire dura-
tion of the vowel + /r/ portion of the syllable rime), and then measured the duration
of the vocalic portion, the vowel quality in terms of the first three formants at the
midpoint, and vowel tracks for the last five glottal pulses, again for the first three for-
mants. Formant measures were extracted using Praat, and then corrected by hand.
The classic acoustic ‘signature’ of approximant /r/ s, and also some trills and
taps, is a lowered third formant (Lawson et al. 2011a; though see Heselwood &
Plug 2011). The lowered F3 relates to the dimensions of a large cavity in the front
of the vocal tract arising from specific articulatory gestures. The rather different
configuration for uvular /r/ shows a different pattern of high and/or raised F3.
Visual inspection of the spectrograms provided the following acoustic information
for the four auditory variant categories shown above in Figure 5:- articulated /r/: This included taps, a few weak approximants, and a single trill
in the oldest man. The taps showed the expected momentary reduction in
amplitude across the frequency range (Figure 6a), and the trill had four such