VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
they also found speaker-specific differences among subjects as concerns time-locked vs.
look ahead strategies 88 . Perkell & Matthies (1992), based on previous research,
proposed a hybrid model, which was a compromise of the former two. This hybrid
model is based on the observation that the lip-protrusion gesture comprises two
components, a low-velocity initial phase and a more rapid and prominent second
phase 89 . As concerns the end of component 2, which is temporally related to the
acoustic onset of /u/, they found considerable variation among their subjects (speakers
of American English) in the shape and timing of /u/ protrusion trajectories.
"Subject 1 an 4 appear to always end protrusion near the /u/ onset, whereas this constraint
seems to be slightly less rigid for subject 3 and weakest for subject 2, whose normal
speaking rate was faster than the other three." (Perkell & Matthies 1992: 2923)
This observation of two components in the lip protrusion gesture touches a further
aspect, namely, differentiating coarticulation from processes. A phonological aspect of
interpreting differences in lip protrusion has been put forward by Boyce (1990) on her
analysis of the "trough" – effect in Turkish and English. Several studies on English,
Swedish, Spanish and French (McAllister 1978, Gay 1978, Engstrand 1981, Perkell
1986, all cited in Boyce 1990) report that, for sequences of two rounded vowels with
intermediate consonants, EMG recordings show a diminution of rounding during the
consonant. In her analysis, Boyce (1990) found clear differences between the languages
Turkish and English: Turkish speakers showed a consistent plateaulike pattern of
movement, whereas the English speakers exhibited the trough pattern. Boyce concludes:
"The complexity of this interpretation lies in the conclusion that different languages may
employ different articulatory strategies. In some sense, this is to be expected, since the
combination of phonology, lexicon, and syntax in different languages may impose entirely
different challenges to articulatory efficiency. In fact, the hypothesis behind this comparison
of Turkish and English was the notion that, in contrast to English, Turkish provides ideal
conditions for articulatory look-ahead. [...] The finding that current models of coarticulation
are insufficient to account for language diversity indicates how difficult it may be to
penetrate to the universal level of speech production." (Boyce 1990: 2593f).
88
See Farnetani (1997) and Farnetani & Recasens (1999) for an overview of coarticulation
models.
89
Similar results have been obtained by Benguerel et al. (1977) and Al-Bamerni & Bladon
(1982) for nasalization.