VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
In spontaneous speech, it was not possible to find sufficient items for all speakers.
However, those speakers who uttered enough items within each of the three consonantal
contexts, exposed no statistically significant differences for F2 at vowel midpoint.
Moreover, F2 values at vowel midpoint dropped in spontaneous speech as compared to
the sentence reading condition, adjusting – to those in a bilabial or velar context.
These results suggest investigating fronting in the most formal task, the reading of
logatomes. Table 6.3 gives the results of one-way ANOVAs for the back vowels at
vowel midpoint:
Sp012 Sp180
/u/ /ï/ /o/ /O/ /u/ /ï/ /o/ /O/
F1 – + – – + – – –
F2 – + – + – + – +
F3 – + + + + – – +
Table 6.3: Statistically significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) based on one-way ANOVAs of
vowel midpoint formant frequencies of the back rounded vowels depending on the
place of articulation of the preceding plosive (bilabial, alveolar, velar). Speaker
sp012 and sp180, logatome reading task.
As concerns F2, both sp012 and sp180 expose statistically significant differences for the
[–constricted] vowels /ï/ and /O/. Figure 6.2 shows the spectral change over time for all
vowels /O/ in the bilabial, alveolar, and velar context for p180.
It can be seen from Figure 6.2 that F2 values at vowel midpoint of almost all
items in the alveolar context exceed the values in the bilabial and velar context, and the
calculated F-value considerably exceeds the critical F-value (F(2,21) = 33,32, p = 0.00).
Again, no correlation could be observed between F2 at vowel midpoint and duration
(expressed in NoP). The same can be observed for the vowel /ï/ for both p012 and
p180. Table 6.4 gives the mean F2 values measured at vowel midpoint for the back
rounded vowels in bilabial, alveolar, and velar contexts.
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