VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Sylvia Moosmüller lowering or lip protrusion), which are language, variety, or even speaker specific, and, consequently, planned. Much of the debate within phonetic theory resides on the question of “what is controlled and what is a product of execution” (Lindblom 2004: B- 86), i.e. what is not controlled. That such a question is posed at all has, in my opinion, its roots in the fact, that, all of a sudden, phoneticians were confronted with a huge amount of variability (e.g. vowels overlapping in formant frequencies) which they were unable to explain. Stevens & House (1963) and Lindblom (1963) explained the observed variability in their data within the framework of articulatory or acoustic undershoot. The notion of undershoot, on the other hand, implies the notion of a target that is undershot. The notion of the target, since it is usually conceived of as the intention of the speaker, is often intermingled with the notion of the phoneme. This inevitably causes an intermixture of levels. 6.1. Target, invariance, and target undershoot Stevens & House (1963) showed that consonant environment affects the realization of vowels. They interpreted their findings in terms of a production undershoot model. In the same vein, Lindblom (1963), in his work on vowel reduction, conceptualizes reduction in terms of undershoot. Additionally, he gives a concise definition of the target of a vowel: “A target was found to be independent of consonantal context and duration and can thus be looked upon as an invariant attribute of the vowel. Although a phoneme can be realized in a more or less reduced fashion, the talker’s “intention” that underlies the pronunciation of the vowel is always the same, independent of contextual circumstances. A vowel target appears to represent some physiological invariance.” (Lindblom 1963: 1778). According to this definition, the target is identical with the phoneme. Moreover, the phoneme is defined as a talker’s intention, the talker’s intention is invariant and it is assumed that the target corresponds more or less to a pronunciation under ideal conditions. In conditions deviating from this ideal state, the articulators fail to reach the intended target: 174
175 Vowels in Standard Austrian German “Articulators respond to control signals not in a stepwise fashion but smoothly and fairly slowly, owing to intrinsic physiological constraints. Since the speed of articulatory movement is thus limited, the extent to which articulators reach their target positions depends on the relative timing of the excitation signal.” (Lindblom 1963: 1778) This failure to reach the intended target position came to be known as “undershoot” (Stevens & House 1963, Lindblom 1963). To model the speech variability within the framework of articulatory/acoustic undershoot and corresponding perceptual overshoot (Lindblom & Studdert-Kennedy 1967, Nearey 1989, see van Son 1993 for an overview) is convincing, satisfactorily explains variability, and is, today, a well-established concept in phonetics. Yet, the question “whether and to what extent the human speech perception could be able to recover intentions in motor tasks that are not achieved” (Perrier 2005: 128) is still unsolved. Moreover, given the fact that the actual output does, in most cases, not correspond to the intended target, especially in weak prosodic positions, speech production can be considered a consecutive succession of failures. Speaking, within this framework, would be an utterly frustrating activity. Apart from that, languages display very clear sequential constraints, in the way that unpronounceable sequences are not allowed. Therefore, among the languages described so far, no sequence of phonemes such as, e.g., */fpdk/, can be found. It has to be questioned why a language should allow a sequence for which the articulators constantly and systematically fail to reach the intended target. duration: One crucial aspect in Lindblom’s argumentation for the undershoot concept is “As a vowel becomes shorter, there is less and less time for the articulators to complete their “on-“ and “off-glide” movements within the CVC syllable. Provided that the neural events corresponding to the phonemes actually stay invariant, the speech organs fail, as a result of the physiological limitations, to reach the positions that they assume when the vowel is pronounced under ideal steady-state conditions.” (Lindblom 1963: 1779) Subsequent studies showed that vowel quality does not change as a function of vowel duration (Gay 1978, Nord 1975, 1986, Engstrand 1988, van Son & Pols 1990, 1992, van
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VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN
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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
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1. Introduction: Setting the Theore
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3 Vowels in Standard Austrian Germa
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11 Vowels in Standard Austrian Germ
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Hz 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 N
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� Speaker sp127: Student, male, 2
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4. Vowel inventory and features 51
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Spontaneous speech Long vowel + len
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Spontaneous speech Long vowel + len
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Height 0 10 20 30 40 u i o ö ü e
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Vowel category Variability Coeffici
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z-score 5,00 4,00 3,00 2,00 1,00 0,
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Appendix 269 Vowels in Standard Aus
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