VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
Öhman's (1966) Swedish subject, however, palatalised the alveolar plosive, so that
palatalization or suppression of palatalization might be a dialectal or idiosynchratic
feature in Swedish, dependent on whether the plosive is articulated with the tongue tip
(apical) or with the tongue blade (laminal) (Wood 1996: 159).
In Standard Austrian German, the burst spectra of plosives are for the most part
shaped by the following vowel. The burst spectra of plosives preceding the stressed
vowel /i/, therefore, are comparable with the burst spectra of Russian palatalised
plosives (Fant 1970). In the same way as for Bulgarian, this palatalization has to be
classified as an assimilatory process. Examples for plosives preceding a stressed vowel
/i/ are presented in Figure 5.2 (second plosive in the spectrogram exposes /t/ from
"Tiger" (tiger)), Figure 5.9 for the sequence /gi/ from "gieß" (to water: IMP), and Figure
5.10 for the sequence /bi/ from "Bier" (beer). In any case it could be shown that the
tongue is already in pre-palatal position at release, an observable movement of formants
is due to the increase of the lip area (Manuel & Stevens 1995). Unpalatalised /b/ and /d/
would, in any case, expose a sharp rise in formant frequencies at vowel onset (Stevens
1999: 341 and 356), starting at approximately 1050 Hz for the bilabial plosive and at
approximately 1600 Hz for the alveolar 103 . In any case, at vowel onset, speakers of the
current study expose much higher F2 values than the ones calculated by Stevens (1999)
for unpalatalised ones. As concerns the velar plosive 104 , tongue body location is
adjusted to the location of the following vowel, i.e. tongue body is fronted before /i/.
Figure 5.13 gives the distribution of the first five frames of F2 and F3, calculated
from vowel onset for CV sequences, where C is either bilabial, alveolar or velar and V
bears primary stress (task: reading sentences).
103 For a vocal tract length of 17 cm, i.e. an average male speaker.
104 No modelling for /gi/ is presented in Stevens (1999) or Manuel & Stevens (1995).