A study examined what trained phoneticians do when they are presented with a transcription task to carry out without any knowledge of the dialect they are listening to and without any explicit phonological theory as a point of departure. The "best" tokens of three categories of potential assimilation (full, partial, and zero alveolar) were drawn from electropalatograms and recordings of sentences and recordings made by a linguistically naive speaker. These tokens were then transferred to a test tape and transcribed by 13 phoneticians, who provided a narrow transcription, lexical identification, and rating by category. Results suggest that identification of these tokens as alveolar or otherwise involves an extremely complex set of factors, including knowledge of the auditory effects of different tongue gestures, differential vowel quality and length in different consonantial contexts, and dialect-specific allophonic differences. The task of transcription is seen as an inherently ambiguous task at several levels, and transcription without any kind of theory is not recommended. (MSE)