VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
Median F3 /bi, pi/ /di, ti/ /gi, ki/
sp180 2854 3338 3247
sp129 2855 3108 3342
sp082 2670 2999 2989
sp012 2879 3093 3212
sp126 2692 2778 2854
sp127 2288 2715 2955
Table 5.3.: Median F3 values of the first five frames calculated from vowel onset in bilabial,
alveolar and velar context, stressed position, sentence reading task.
Since no normal distribution can be assumed for the data, a Median Test has been
performed. Two speakers (sp126 and sp082) did not differentiate the alveolar and velar
context for both F2 and F3, a further speaker (sp127) did not differentiate the alveolar
and velar context for F2. The bilabial and velar context was not differentiated by four
speakers (sp126, sp012, sp082, and sp129) for F2, but all speakers differentiated F3 for
this context pair. With the exception of speaker sp126, who did not differentiate bilabial
and velar context for F2, all speakers differentiated bilabial and velar context.
Therefore, the bilabial context is differentiated by all speakers, at least with respect to
F3. Differentiation of alveolar and velar context is less secure.
For each subject, F2 106 and F3 are lower in bilabial context. These differences
hold also for stressed positions in spontaneous speech. From an articulatory point of
view, the lower values for F2 and F3 point out that in many instances, there is less
contact between the tongue and the palate when /i/ is preceded by a bilabial plosive than
when preceded by an alveolar or a velar plosive. Thus, alveolar and velar plosives
increase contact area and are more subject to palatalization than a bilabial plosive.
When, then, does palatalization start? Wood (1996) could observe for Bulgarian
that palatalization of the alveolar consonant started already during the vowel preceding
the plosive. In order to test whether palatalization starts that early in Standard Austrian
German, C1V1C2V2 sequences were chosen where C1 is an alveolar plosive /d/, V1 has a
106 Except for speaker sp126, who, however, exposes no statistically significant differences
for any context, i. e. consonantal contexts are completely blurred.