VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
velar constriction location 107 , C2 is either labial, alveolar, alveo-palatal, or velar, and V2
is either a back or a front vowel and has, in any case, a stronger prosodic position than
V1. Examples are:
"du bald" (you soon): C1 = alveolar, V1 = velar, C2 = labial, V2 = back
"du sehen" (you see: INF): C1 = alveolar, V1 = velar, C2 = alveolar, V2 = front
"du kaum" (you hardly) C1 = alveolar, V1 = velar, C2 = velar, V2 = back
In the case where palatalization would start at the offset of V1, F2 of the velar vowel /u/
would substantially rise as the tongue moves from a velar to a palatal location. Figure
5.15 gives an example of four utterances of a male speaker (sp126) where C2 is a
bilabial and V2 is either a back vowel or a front vowel.
Hz
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
du bald (red) - du bitte (blue)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
156
frames
Figure 5.15: F2 movement over time of 2 items of /dubAld/ "du bald" (you soon) and of two
items of /dubçtE/ "du bitte" (you please), speaker sp127, sentence reading task.
Frames 1 to 5: F2 of the last five frames of /u/, frames 8-9: spectral peaks of the
burst of the bilabial plosive associated with F2, frames 12 to 16: F2 of the first five
frames of /A/ (red) or of /ç/ (blue).
107 A back vowel has been chosen as the starting point in order to be able to observe whether
the tongue starts a movement towards a fronted configuration already at the offset of the
back vowel.