VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
As becomes apparent from Tables 4.18 – 4.20, the two vowels /e/ and /E/ are clearly
kept apart. In the logatome reading task, both speakers discern the pair by all three
formants, and in the sentence reading task in the stressed position, all speakers but one
discern the pair by all three formants. Figure 4.18 summarizes the results of the
statistical analysis:
Figure 4.18: Results of the one-tailed t-tests for the vowel pair /e/ – /E/. For each formant and
each speaking task, statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) are indicated by
crossbeams. Where no differences occur for a given formant, the space is left
blank. Legend as in Table 4.12.
It can be read from Figure 4.18 that an opposition is maintained for at least one formant
in each speaking task (except for speaker sp180 who neutralizes the opposition in the
unstressed position in spontaneous speech). However, even more important is the result
that in unstressed positions, speakers maintain the opposition in different ways. Apart
from the fact that reveals some speaker-specific information, this result also points out
that speakers make use of different articulatory configurations and consequently of