U.S. Dopers, are cot / caught pronounced the same to you?

[Balthisar]

@Onomatopoeia

Okay, because I love you guys so much, and because I am amazed so many of you can’t hear the difference between cot and caught, I recorded the different pronunciations for you. In fact I recorded four of the commonest ones.

• First is what I’ll call the upper Midwest version, which is a homonym of the word cot.
• Second is the mid-Atlantic version. This is how I say it.
• Third is the New York version.
• Fourth and last is the Appalachian version.
  Get the file here. It is in .wav format.

So now, what say you all?

Okay, so I finally got to listen the file. There’s definitely a notable distance between 1 and 2.
#1: What are you defining as upper Midwest? I’m a SE Michigan native, and while I hear some people use this pronunciation, it’s typically the less educated or working class (the same people who want an “ink pin”).
#2: Similarly, what’s considered mid-Atlantic? This is the version normal I would expect among peers in SE Michigan.
#3: New York? Really? This kind of sounds like one of those exaggerations people do on television, say, a news paper kid: “Extra, extra, read all about it! They co-ut the cat burglar!” Then again, maybe TV is influencing me into thing everyone talks normal, without an accent! (FWIW, when I spent considerable time in Buffalo, I was amazed at how much it reminded me of Detroit, especially the speech.)
#4: We have country folk with their country accent in Michigan that I could easily imagine speak like this.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@friedo

@Oakminster

Cot rhymes with hot.

Caught rhymes with fought.

This is the correct answer.

What sounds different to me, depending on the dialect, is sometimes the quality of the vowel but more often the length. While it would be hard for me to distinguish the two words in isolation, “caught” seems to have a longer vowel in most cases. By “longer” I mean in the phonological sense; it’s slightly more protracted than the /o/ in cot.