Scobbie, James M.Wrench, Alan A.Recasens, D.Romero, J.Solé, M. J.2018-06-292018-06-292003Scobbie, J. & Wrench, A. (2003) An articulatory investigation of word final /l/ and /l/-sandhi in three dialects of English. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 1871-1874.https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/2248We use the MOCHA articulatory speech database to ex-plore word-final /l/ in English. Eight speakers, drawn from three nations with distinct phonological systems (Scotland, England and USA) all display pervasive and systematic /l/ vocalisation (defined as lack of alveolar contact in EPG data). Vocalisation of word-final /l/ is radically con-text-dependent for seven subjects. These English speakers have a post-lexical external sandhi alternation of conso-nantal vs. vocalic /l/ which appears categorical. We de-scribe the general tendencies and the systematic linguistic differences between speakers, which are orthogonal to national dialect. Coda (re)syllabification of /l/ is not subtle or flexible enough to condition the distribution of vocali-sation. Prosodic, segmental and phrasal factors are all re-quired. A preliminary EMA analysis of intracontextual variability reveals both gradient and categorical aspects.1871-1874book_section