VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
as well. The only speaker who does not fit into this pattern is speaker sp127, the
youngest speaker of all, who, in the stressed positions in the sentence reading task,
neither upholds an opposition with respect to F2, nor with respect to F3. The same holds
for unstressed positions for this speaker and speaker sp082 in spontaneous speech. It
cannot be decided at this point of the investigation, whether these deviations point to a
sound change which changes the feature [±pre-palatal] to [±open], leaving the
discriminatory ability to F1 only. Anyhow, five out of six speakers clearly discern two
constriction locations in the front region.
According to perception tests (Linder 1976, Sendlmeier 1981), /e/ tends to be
mixed up with /ç/. These results lead Sendlmeier (1985) to see /e/ rather as the long
partner of /ç/ than of /E/. Consequently, it has to be tested whether these two vowels are
held apart acoustically in Standard Austrian German.
Figure 4.19: Results of the one-tailed t-tests for the vowel pair /e/ – /ç/. 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.
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