He is currently President of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians. He collaborated with several phoneticians, principally Arthur S. Abramson. He then studied the degree of agreement or disagreement among the phoneticians. Empirical evidence for this ability in trained phoneticians is hard to come by. Three nineteenth-century British phoneticians worked on this topic. More than 700 phoneticians from 35 countries participated in the Congress. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but some phoneticians make a distinction. Some systems, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet are still in wide use among phoneticians. Phoneticians call this accent "Conservative Received Pronunciation". A number of phoneticians distinguish between semivowels and approximants by their location in a syllable. In 2008, 61% of British people pronounced "diphthong" as , though phoneticians prefer . Phoneticians agree that the tongue is the most important speech articulator, followed by the lips.