VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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175<br />
Vowels in Standard Austrian German<br />
“Articulators respond to control signals not in a stepwise fashion but smoothly and fairly<br />
slowly, owing to intrinsic physiological constraints. Since the speed of articulatory<br />
movement is thus limited, the extent to which articulators reach their target positions<br />
depends on the relative timing of the excitation signal.” (Lindblom 1963: 1778)<br />
This failure to reach the intended target position came to be known as “undershoot”<br />
(Stevens & House 1963, Lindblom 1963). To model the speech variability within the<br />
framework of articulatory/acoustic undershoot and corresponding perceptual overshoot<br />
(Lindblom & Studdert-Kennedy 1967, Nearey 1989, see van Son 1993 for an overview)<br />
is convincing, satisfactorily explains variability, and is, today, a well-established con-<br />
cept in phonetics. Yet, the question<br />
“whether and to what extent the human speech perception could be able to recover intentions<br />
in motor tasks that are not achieved” (Perrier 2005: 128)<br />
is still unsolved. Moreover, given the fact that the actual output does, in most cases, not<br />
correspond to the intended target, especially in weak prosodic positions, speech<br />
production can be considered a consecutive succession of failures. Speaking, within this<br />
framework, would be an utterly frustrating activity. Apart from that, languages display<br />
very clear sequential constraints, in the way that unpronounceable sequences are not<br />
allowed. Therefore, among the languages described so far, no sequence of phonemes<br />
such as, e.g., */fpdk/, can be found. It has to be questioned why a language should allow<br />
a sequence for which the articulators constantly and systematically fail to reach the<br />
intended target.<br />
duration:<br />
One crucial aspect in Lindblom’s argumentation for the undershoot concept is<br />
“As a vowel becomes shorter, there is less and less time for the articulators to complete their<br />
“on-“ and “off-glide” movements within the CVC syllable. Provided that the neural events<br />
corresponding to the phonemes actually stay invariant, the speech organs fail, as a result of<br />
the physiological limitations, to reach the positions that they assume when the vowel is<br />
pronounced under ideal steady-state conditions.” (Lindblom 1963: 1779)<br />
Subsequent studies showed that vowel quality does not change as a function of vowel<br />
duration (Gay 1978, Nord 1975, 1986, Engstrand 1988, van Son & Pols 1990, 1992, van