VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
The articulators have to fulfill certain requirements to produce a given sequence, and
this process of production is the subject of articulatory phonetics. Yet, Tabain's
conclusion positions the role of acoustic phonetics:
"Although the chapter may initially seem like a "downer" after so many mainstream
articulatory and even theoretical chapters, it is in fact an excellent reminder that the study of
coarticulation is ultimately meaningless unless it can be related to an acoustic output, and
hence to the perception of the speech signal." (Tabain 2001)
The crucial point in the discussion whether acoustic phonetics can contribute something
to the study of coarticulation is, however, the fact that the results of articulatory phone-
tics and acoustic analyses cannot be directly compared. To give a simple example: in a
sequence V1CV2, where C is a bilabial plosive, the tongue is said to be free to move
from V1 to V2, and at the point of release, the tongue is already in the position for V2.
This is impressively shown by the x-ray motion films produced by Wood (1996): in the
sequence /o#pă/ from the Bulgarian utterance "deteto xodi po pătishtata" ("The child
was walking along the path") the uvular tongue body withdrawal of /o/ and the
pharyngeal tongue body approach for /ă/ happen during the occlusion phase of the
bilabial plosive (Wood 1996: 156, Figure 9). Another example is drawn from English,
in which the tongue keeps the position of the vowel [é] and the lips are close for [m],
while the velum is raised for [p] in the utterance "camping" (Kent 1983: 68). From an
articulatory point of view, the mandible and tongue can work independently from one
another to a large extent and two vowels interrupted by a labial consonant rather
perform a diphthongal lingual movement. For this reason, some researchers restrict their
analyses on vowel to vowel coarticulation on sequences in which the consonant(s) are
bilabial (e.g. Manuel 1990, Magen 1997, Cho 2004) 97 .
"The first and second consonants (C1, C2) were always /b/, whose articulation is known to
interfere minimally with the vocalic lingual articulation." (Cho 2004: 146)
However, diphthongal tongue movement during a bilabial closure is not undisputed. So-
called troughs (deactivation of the tongue musculature during the bilabial closure) in
97 Acoustic analyses have been performed by Manuel (1990) and Magen (1997). The study
performed by Cho (2004) is an articulatory one.