Standard Scottish English (SSE) traditionally lacks the pandialectal English contrast between paired tense and lax vowels in three instances, resulting in homophones like (1) palm-Pam, (2) caught-cot and (3) pool-pull, from the lexical sets palm/bath/trap, thought/lot and goose/foot, respectively. Individual speakers may differentiate between paired vowels, and it has been proposed that (2) above implies (1), and (3) implies both (2) and (1). However, this implicational hierarchy has neither been motivated nor investigated empirically. This article inspects the first two formants of vowels produced by n = 34 speakers from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Scotland). While the nature of the modest pairwise differentiation that occurs in the data agrees with the notion of an incipient split along Southern British lines, there is no evidence of an implicational hierarchy. Furthermore, the two basic predictors age and gender are of limited explanatory value.
