The prototypical articulatory-acoustic properties of schwa being normally thought of as definitional, this vowel sound is typically described in terms of tongue position as a mid-central, neutral vowel sound. At the same time, instrumental analysis shows that schwa in English is context-driven to a much larger extent than any other vowel; articulatorily, it is in fact “inherently unspecified for tongue position”, and acoustically, a comparison of the experimental data with this first approximation model does not show a good agreement, hence the interest of a systematic contextual study of schwa.