VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Sylvia Moosmüller (1992) showed that listeners rely more on vowel-inherent factors and that coarticulatory cues play a minor role in the perception of vowels. Hillenbrand & Nearey (1999) conclude that “spectral change patterns play a secondary but quite important role in the recognition of vowel quality. […] However, a simple observation that should not be lost in this discussion of spectral change is that the single-slice spectral measurements reported in studies such as Peterson and Barney (1952) capture most of the information that is needed to represent vowel quality. In the present study, F0, duration, and steady-state formant measurements were sufficient to signal the intended vowel for roughly three-fourths of the utterances, with nearly all of the misidentifications involving adjacent vowel categories.” (Hillenbrand & Nearey 1999: 3521) Pitermann (2000) comes to the conclusion that static information is sufficient for identifying the vowels. Carré & Divenyi (2000) stress the importance of dynamic changes. It is already a challenge to look for invariant acoustic properties for stop consonants. Modifications to the original templates proposed by Blumstein & Stevens (1979) have been made in order to extend the concept to languages which differentiate further or places of articulation other than the bilabial, alveolar or velar (Lahiri et al. 1984, Blumstein 1986). This task seems even more unsolvable for vowels. As is well known, the acoustic properties of vowels change in dependence on linguistic and extralinguistic factors, languages or language variants. Thus, the acoustic properties of the vowel /i/ are not the same in English and Standard Austrian German; in English, /i/ is characterized by a spectral dominance of F2 and F3, in Standard Austrian German by a spectral dominance of F3 and F4. Therefore, the claim of the theory of acoustic invariance, “that a particular phonetic dimension should be realized by the same invariant property across all languages” (Lahiri et al. 1984: 391), cannot be upheld for vowels. Confronted with this lack of (articulatory and acoustic) invariance, it has to be asked, consequently, what makes an /i/ an /i/ (see also the discussion in Donegan 2002). 178
6.2. Undershoot vs. Processes 179 Vowels in Standard Austrian German A frequently cited example for undershoot is the fronting of back rounded vowels in the alveolar context in English. In their study on the effects of consonant environment on vowels, Stevens & House (1963) found that especially the F2 of the vowel /u/ was displaced by about 350 Hz in the alveolar context. The Stevens & House study was repeated by Hillenbrand et al. (2001). Their results were similar to Stevens & House’s; as concerns the back rounded vowel, they found even larger F2 displacements: “As with SH [Stevens & House], the largest effect by far is a raising of F2 for /u/ in the environment of alveolar consonants. At about 500 Hz for the men and nearly 600 Hz for the women (relative to null environments), this upward shift is even larger than the roughly 350 Hz effect reported by SH.” (Hillenbrand et al. 2001: 754) This displacement of F2 is often interpreted within an undershoot model and allocated to physiological constraints (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Since the targets are a long way away from each other, the tongue cannot move sufficiently back in order to form a constriction in the velar region for the vowel /u/. Moon & Lindblom (1994), in analyzing /wVC/-sequences, concluded that “from a biomechanical point of view, formant undershoot ought to be a function of “locustarget” distance, vowel duration and F2 rate of change.” (Moon & Lindblom 1994: 53). However, F2 displacement could not be observed for all languages. Flemming (2001) showed that French, German and Hindi display F2 undershoot to a lesser degree than English, with German displaying the least F2 displacement from the defined target 117 . It is further argued that languages with high front rounded vowels do not apply fronting in order to maintain the necessary contrasts. Within this line of argumentation, Oh (2002) showed that Chinese, French and German display considerably less F2 displacement for /u/ in alveolar context than English. However, even within these three languages, which all exhibit front rounded vowels, differences occurred: 117 Target F2 was estimated by measuring F2 either in isolation or adjacent to [h] (Fleming 2001: 23).
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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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101 Vowels in Standard Austrian Ger
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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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