http://www.yek.me.uk/threeareas.html
Т.е. головастые эксперты на слух не могут согласиться друг с другом.The last and in some ways most fascinating chapter of all is based on an experiment in which 18 phoneticians were asked to plot on the cardinal vowel diagram 10 vowels of a speaker of a Gaelic dialect not familiar to any of them. ‘Each subject listened to the recording by himself, playing it back as often as he wished and in any way that he found convenient’ (It is not completely clear what this very last remark means). It was intended to correspond ‘as much as possible to the typical situation in which a phonetician needs to be able to describe vowels for purposes of linguistic research. The plottings are presented in the form of several admirable diagrams. There were some startling results. Firstly the three subjects described as ‘good phoneticians with a knowledge of many different languages and experience of dialectology’ who had not, however, received training in recognition of the cardinal vowels were adjudged by the author as ‘nevertheless relatively unable to communicate in writing in an unambiguous way about the quality of a vowel sound’. In terms of peripheral versus central qualities the group of phoneticians of Edinburgh were found to understand each other well. And so were the London group amongst themselves. But each group understood ‘very significantly’ less well the phoneticians of the other university. When it came to unrounded back vowels the trained subjects proved to be little or no better than the three phoneticians with no cardinal vowel training.