VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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Sylvia Moosmüller<br />
Connell 2002), therefore pointing rather to a planning of F0 than to an automatic<br />
mechanism as proposed by Whalen et al. (1998, 1999).<br />
For Standard Austrian German, the traditional division of vowels according to<br />
several vowel heights (= tongue height) has been abandoned in favour of contrastive<br />
constriction locations with two degrees of constriction at each location. Variations in<br />
constriction degree are reserved to variations in speech style rather than to contrastive<br />
function. Moreover, the traditional division also lacks physiological realism, since it has<br />
been proved in many investigations that the tongue has a higher position for the vowel<br />
/a/ than for /O/ or even /o/ (Wood 1987, Bohn et al. 1992, Hoole & Mooshammer 2002).<br />
Nevertheless, at least in stressed positions, the F0 of the vowel /A/ is significantly<br />
lower than for the vowels /i/ and /u/, thus corroborating the results of Neweklowsky<br />
(1975), who compared the F0 of /A/ versus /i/ and /u/ in stressed positions for Austrian<br />
German speakers. This result holds for all speakers and all speaking tasks. However, in<br />
unstressed positions, differences between the vowel /A/ and the vowels /i/ and /u/ do not<br />
exist for any speakers in any speaking tasks. As concerns the vowels /e/ and /o/, most<br />
speakers display differences for the vowel /A/ in stressed positions. Only speaker sp012<br />
has a significantly lower F0 for the vowel /A/ as compared to the vowels /e/ and /o/ in<br />
two speaking tasks (reading logatomes and sentences). Speaker sp082 has a<br />
significantly higher F0 for the vowel /e/ in spontaneous speech, speaker sp127 has a<br />
significantly higher F0 for the vowel /o/ in spontaneous speech, and speaker sp180 has a<br />
significantly higher F0 for the vowel /o/ in reading logatomes and reading sentences. In<br />
unstressed positions as well, significant results only show up sporadically (speaker<br />
sp012: /e/ in the spontaneous speech task, /o/ in the sentence reading task; speaker<br />
sp180: /e/ and /o/ in sentence reading task). In other words, no clear picture emerges<br />
with respect to a difference between /A/ and the vowels /e, o/ 81 . The traditional<br />
81 It has to be emphasized that the vowels /e, o/ and /i, u/ are not distinguished by tongue<br />
height, but by constriction location, therefore, /e, o/ should behave in the same way as /i,<br />
u/, if the correlation tongue height and F0 were compelling.<br />
116