VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
The velar plosive of the sequence /çgE/ from "winzige" (tiny: PL; Figure 5.7) exposes
multiple releases, and, most interestingly, each individual spectrum has a different
shape, indicating a successive re-positioning of the tongue 99 . After the third release, the
tongue is in the position for the /E/, and, consequently, no transitional movements of
formant frequencies are observable at the onset of the vowel /E/. In Figure 5.8, the
approach of the velar constriction – the velar plosive is articulated as a voiced velar
fricative – starts shortly after the vowel midpoint at about 50 ms from the vowel onset
(total duration of the vowel /i/: 92 ms) and manifests itself in the change in cavity
affiliation of F2 and F3 (high F3 and therefore proximity of F3 and F4 in the first part of
the vowel, which points to a front cavity affiliation of F3, low F3 and proximity of F2
and F3, pointing to a back cavity affiliation of F3).
99 Multiple releases can be observed sometimes, especially for velar stop consonants. They
are described as a consequence of vibration of the tongue surface that forms the
constriction (Stevens 1999: 370). The current observation of changes in the spectral shape
would add a phonetic and phonological motivation to such multiple releases, namely
positioning the tongue body for the following vowel, which might demand several trials
caused by the inertia of the tongue body. Such hypothesis would need to be tested, of
course.
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