72 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
the East. We also found that whilst transcribers effectively segmented the auditory
continuum at different points, they were internally consistent.
There is also another key shared feature. All three transcribers found that they
could not assign what they heard only to two categories, ‘plain vowel’ or some kind
of articulated /r/ (the phonetic variants are grouped together for this representa-
tion but ranged from weak approximants to weak taps). A third auditory category
was needed for variants which fell between articulated /r/ and no audible articula-
tion at all, which could be termed either as ‘extremely weak uvular approximants’
or as ‘pharyngealized or uvularized vowels’. This could be interpreted in a pre-
scriptive way as analysts simply being unable to implement the IPA categories
appropriately. But we will see that the acoustic, and especially the articulatory, data
show that a category to accommodate such a variable percept – hearing sometimes
a consonantal gesture and sometimes not – is well motivated.0
CT JSS RL2468101214160
CT JSS RL24681012140
CT JSS RL246810121416180
CT JSS RL24681012141618Figure 5. Results of the auditory transcription of postvocalic /r/ in word-list data
read by 12 male Glaswegian working-class speakers, organised into four age groups
(1 = 10–11, 2 = 12–13, 3 = 14–15, 4 = 40–60). The judgments of the three transcribers
(CT, JSS, RL) are shown in each chart from left to right. White = articulated /r/,
spotted = pharyngealised/uvularised vowels, grey = plain vowels, striped = vowels
followed by [h] or [ħ], from Stuart-Smith (2007: 1308).