The inspiration for this investigation was a particular person's pronunciation of a particular word. This was both, as pronounced by David Chudzicki. Instead of the expected [bowT], it sounded as if he was producing [bolT]. I was initially curious both as to whether this was a regular phonological change and to how he might come to have this variant.
It is possible that because [l] pulls the second formant down while [w] additionally pulls the first formant up that variations between [w] and [l] might be `easier' in some fashion. Before trying to make an argument about this, though, I wanted to have some measured formant values to be basing claims on.