VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
between /i/ – /ç/ in spontaneous speech, assuming a complete neutralization of the pair is
not yet justified.
Due to lip protrusion, F2 remains a natural frequency of the front cavity for the
pre-palatal rounded vowels. However, only a moderate lip rounding is favourable for
the vowel /y/ (Wood 1986) in order to avoid too drastic a lowering of F2.
Complementary larynx depression ensures that F2 and F3 come close together. Stevens
(1989) even suggests that F2 and F3 come so close together that the spectral peak
created by the formant pair is to be regarded as a single-peaked prominence instead of a
two-peaked prominence (Stevens 1989: 17). This has in fact been observed for the
vowel /y/ in the analysis of the logatomes (see Figure 4.14).
Figure 4.14: Average spectrum of the vowel /y/ taken from the logatome “pübe”, speaker sp012.
Wood (1986) also observed a lower tongue-body for the vowel /y/ as compared to /i/,
which diminished the F1 contrast with /i/ (Wood 1986: 396). Pouplier et al (2004)
report greater tongue-palate distance only for one out of three subjects. For the others,
no relevant distance differences between /i/ and /y/ could be observed.
In the unconstricted /Y/, lips are more intensely protruded (Valaczkai 1998: 131),
although the ranges overlap. The degree of lip opening, is, as expected, greater for the
unconstricted vowel. This very specific lip configuration, together with complementary
larynx lowering and difference in tongue-palate distance, leads to a higher F1, a lower
F2, and a similar or higher F3 for the unconstricted vowel as compared to the