VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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185<br />
Vowels in Standard Austrian German<br />
already been observed elsewhere (e.g. Abbs 1986). Vaissière (1986) attributes this lack<br />
of invariance partly to non-linguistic factors and partly to “context-dependent<br />
articulatory “weights” assigned by the speaker to different parts of the syllable.”<br />
(Vaissière 1986: 222). The results of Scarborough (2004) are in the same vein: “hard” 120<br />
words expose a higher degree of coarticulation than “easy” words. Moreover, she<br />
proved that the presence of coarticulation facilitates perception, and that, consequently,<br />
listeners make use of coarticulatory information. These findings together with the<br />
observed language-specific differences rule out biomechanical factors and suggest that<br />
processes are at work. Moreover, within the figure-ground preference of Natural<br />
Phonology (Dressler 1984, 1986, 1996), the analysed phenomenon can be characterized<br />
as a foregrounding process.<br />
6.3. Phoneme, allophone, target, and processes<br />
The examples discussed in 6.2 show that the target is variant and has to be<br />
conceptualized differently from the phoneme which is invariant (see 1.2). The phoneme<br />
is the mental representation of a sound and can be modified by processes. The final<br />
output of the phoneme is usually hit by speakers with no speaking or hearing deficits<br />
and under normal speaking conditions. In this way, the final output is an invariant<br />
target, cf. Keating (1990):<br />
“… any single given context reduces, not introduces, variability in a segment” (Keating<br />
1990: 461).<br />
However, since Keating does not assume processes or rules, she allows “arbitrary<br />
variation” (1990: 467). The example given for arbitrary variation is Russian, “with<br />
extensive vowel allophony and reduction” (1990: 467), modelled by defining wide<br />
120 Hard words are words, which, with respect to their intelligibility, expose a low frequency<br />
relative to the sum of the frequencies of all their neighbours and are therefore obscured by<br />
their neighbours, whereas easy words have a high frequency relative to the sum of the<br />
frequencies of all their neighbours and – consequently – stand out against their<br />
neighbours.