Listener expectations and the perception of Scottish English/u/:a sociophonetic investigation

Abstract

A sociophonetic speech perception experiment was conducted using Edinburgh listeners. The participants listened to recorded speech followed by a synthesized /u/ vowel and were asked to decide whether the synthesized vowel matched the one produced by the speaker in a target word contained in each sentence. Half of the listeners were told that the speaker was from Edinburgh and half were told he was from Glasgow; the speaker was actually from Edinburgh. The response patterns of the two groups were analysed to see if there were any significant differences in vowel choices based on the social information given about the speaker. The results are inconclusive, but insight has been gained on the methodology needed for future studies.