VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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