A Dynamic Acoustic View of Real-Time Change in Word-Final Liquids in Spontaneous Glaswegian

This paper investigates the acoustic evidence for real-time change in word-final liquids (/r/ and /l/) in a small-scale study of older male Glaswegian speakers recorded from the 1970s to the 2000s. A dynamic acoustic analysis of the first three formants across the duration of the rhyme (vowel+liquid sequence) shows significant effects of preceding and following phonetic context on the course and trajectories of the formant tracks. We also find raising of F3 for /r/ in speakers who were born and recorded more recently; F2 is lowering for /l/ in the same speakers. Comparison of F2 across the two word-final liquids suggests that /r/ is clearer than /l/ for this Scottish dialect; interestingly the polarity in resonance between /r/ and /l/ is increasing over time