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Windsor Lewis's recent article (1972b) admirably summarizes the case for a Gimson-type transcription as a reference tool for EFL students. As he states, his own ‘CPD’ (Windsor Lewis, 1972a) transcription clearly—and sensibly—derives from the system established by Gimson (1962, 1970) in ‘the standard up-to-date description of Received Pronunciation’. On general principles, there is little that could usefully be added to Windsor Lewis's (1972b) comments on three other transcription types that are increasingly coming to be regarded as inappropriate for EFL purposes:(i) that used by Abercrombie (1964), which, as Windsor Lewis (1972b: 60–63) shows, has disadvantages in its choice of detail symbols (though in underlying philosophy this system is perhaps closer to ‘CPD’ than is the latter's acknowledged parent);(ii) the long-established ‘EPD’ (Jones, 1917) system, with its inconsistent treatment of the monophthong phonemes;(iii) the ‘simplified’ (Jones, 1956: 346 ff.) types of transcription first used in books by Scott (1942) and MacCarthy (1944, 1945) and taken up by Kingdon (West, 1965) and others, which although useful for the Ll speaker are grossly misleading for the EFL student in implying a solely quantitative distinction between such pairs as the vowels of seat and sit.This article will largely take for granted Windsor Lewis's comments on those types, and will concentrate on some aspects of the system discussed by Windsor Lewis (1972b) and applied in his CPD and the new third edition (1974) of the Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

Relationships between a listener's identification of a spoken vowel and its properties as revealed from acoustic measurement of its sound wave have been a subject of study by many investigators. Both the utterance and the identification of a vowel depend upon the language and dialectal backgrounds and the vocal and auditory characteristics of the individuals concerned. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the control methods that have been used in the evaluation of these effects in a vowel study program at Bell Telephone Laboratories. The plan of the study, calibration of recording and measuring equipment, and methods for checking the performance of both speakers and listeners are described. The methods are illustrated from results of tests involving some 76 speakers and 70 listeners.

T HAS LONG BEEN RECOGNIZED that the diphthong [ju] (from the Middle English falling diphthong [iu]) shows a marked tendency toward monophthongization to [u] in words like tune, duke, and news. The trend is observable in both England and America, though to a much greater degree in America. Throughout the English-speaking world the diphthong is retained initially (union, utility, eulogy) and when the preceding consonant is either a bilabial (beauty, pew, muse) or a labiodental (view, few). It is always retained after the aspirate h (huge) and practically always after [k] (cute, curious). After I and r the monophthong is usual, such words as lute and rule with a diphthong being increasingly rare in both England and America. After I and r the diphthong sounds especially artificial in the United States. After s the monophthong is the usual pronunciation in America (suit, assume), and British pronunciation seems to be taking the same direction. The significant variations occur frequently after the alveolars [d], [t], and [n] and sometimes after the interdental [el. Standard British English admits only the diphthong after those consonantal sounds, thus [djuk], [tjub], [njuz]