VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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