86 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
compared). The mimicked data showed little adaptation of tongue configuration,
but some shift in the timing of the gesture (with respect to offset of voicing) par-
ticularly when responding to the tongue-bunched auditory stimuli. It was also
interesting to note that the covert, delayed apical /r/ gesture was not reproduced
when mimicking the audio signal from the derhoticised utterance of hurt; instead
the speaker produced an rless word hut (see Figure 12).Figure 12. Waterfall diagrams of UTI splines from the mimicking study (Lawson et
al. 2011b). Left: the original production of hurt by the mimicker, which sounds weakly
rhotic. Middle: the production of the stimulus for mimicking, auditorily derhoticised
hurt, but with covert delayed tongue-tip raising. Right: the mimicked production of hurt,
without any tongue-tip raising, and sounding like hut. (Note that /t/ in these word is
realized as a glottal stop.)With respect to derhoticisation, the results confirmed that delay in the tongue tip
gesture can lead to an ambiguous auditory percept not only for an analyst, but also
for a derhoticising member of the Scottish speech community. Our suspicions that
the acoustic signal could be difficult to parse seem plausible, though this needs
more investigation, which is now underway in a systematic socio-articulatory
phonetic study using mimicking in conjunction with UTI recordings. This study
will allow us todevelop a clearer picture of how articulatory variation spreads from
speaker to hearer.- Discussion and reflection: The sociophonology
of Scottish derhoticisation
The studies presented, both by previous scholars and ourselves, show that rhoticity
in Scottish English has been eroding gradually over the 20th century for working-
class speakers, and possibly for longer. This is counterbalanced by an increas-
ingly auditorily strong rhoticity in middle-class speakers (see Lennon 2011). The
changes are largely driven by sociolinguistic dynamics within this Scottish com-
munity, though there is evidence for reinforcement from an unlikely source, indi-
rect contact with London English on TV. Describing and accounting for these
changes phonetically has also been a focus – and of course – is far from complete.
A number of issues arise, but we focus here on two which relate to representation,