VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
or start in the oral airflow. Theoretically, Menzerath & de Lacerda push the problem of
segmentation to the level of phonology ("Lautabgrenzung heißt aber offenbar
Abgrenzung der Laute", S. 59, see also Nolan & Kühnert 1999, Tillman & Mansell
1980), whilst practically they use the information of the electro-labiograph (for labial
consonant - vowel sequences) or the curve of the oral airflow.
Menzerath & de Lacerda do not differentiate between anticipatory and carry-over
coarticulation, this is not crucial to their argumentation of the continuous flow of
speech. Yet both directions occur in their material and with intraspeaker variability. For
example, in the sequences "máma" and "mamá", spoken in isolation, both final vowels
appear as non-nasal, independent of their accent, whereas within a sentence, the same
wordfinal á, followed by a velar plosive, is slightly nasalized throughout.
High variability in the quality and timing of nasalization has been observed by
many researchers sofar. Moll & Daniloff (1971) could show that anticipatory nasali-
zation could appear over two vowels preceding the nasal, even if interrupted by a word-
boundary 87 , and that quite often there was as much velar opening during the vowels as
during the nasal consonant. On the other hand, velar closure NVC sequences started
either during the nasal consonant, during the approach to the vowel, or during the
steady-state portion of the vowels (Moll & Daniloff 1971: 681). Speaker-specific
differences could also be observed in an utterance final sequence /ni/ (from "money").
One speaker exhibited velar closure for the final vowel, one showed a movement
towards closure, though closure was not achieved, and two speakers exhibited no velar
closure movement, the velum remaining fully open throughout the vowel (Moll & Dani-
loff 1971: 682).
Language-specific differences in vowel nasalization have been observed by
Clumeck (1976), Solé & Ohala (1991), and Cohn (1993), among others. Clumeck
(1976) could show that velar coarticulation differs in temporal extent across the six
87 Contrary to Kozhevnikov & Chistovich (1965), who propose a syllable based approach.