VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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197<br />
Vowels in Standard Austrian German<br />
A visual comparison of Figure 6.6 and Figure 6.7 shows not only that the vertical span<br />
is lower within each formant in Figure 6.7, but also, that a clear demarcation between<br />
F2 and F3 is apparent, whereas in Figure 6.6, this demarcation between F2 and F3 is<br />
partly smeared. The blurring in Figure 6.6 results from the fact that although vowels all<br />
carry primary lexical stress and share the same phonetic context, vowels from different<br />
prosodic positions have been superimposed. This means that ultimately, invariance lies<br />
not so much in the phonetic context than in precisely determined stress assignment<br />
which attributes the ultimate shape to the phoneme (see 6.6.3).<br />
In the unstressed position, statistically significant differences between the<br />
conditions appear only for F3 of the vowel /i/ (see Table 6.7):<br />
Var. coeff. C1 C2 C1 C2 C1 C2<br />
unstressed /i/ /i/ /e/ /e/ /A/ /A/<br />
F1 7.70 8.45 6.74 6.00 17.93 8.91<br />
F2 3.28 4.46 4.95 4.43 4.44 5.67<br />
F3 3.42 5.73 3.62 3.43 2.52 3.29<br />
Table 6.7: Variability coefficients calculated at vowel midpoint under two different conditions<br />
(C). C1: vowel drawn from one and the same sentence repeated ten times, C2:<br />
vowel controlled for phonetic context. Statistically significant differences (p ≤<br />
0.05) are printed in bold.<br />
It has already been explicated that the vowel /i/ is articulated in an acoustically unstable<br />
region which results in a high variability (especially of F3). This becomes apparent here<br />
again, where F3 shows more variability in Condition 2 as compared to Condition 1. The<br />
other vowels exhibit no statistically significant differences between the conditions.<br />
These results show, moreover, that variability as a whole is reduced in unstressed<br />
positions. It has already been put forward in Moosmüller (2002), and will be dealt with<br />
in 6.6.2, that unstressed positions exhibit less variability than stressed positions. This is<br />
confirmed here insofar as no statistically significant differences appear for the vowels<br />
/e/ and /A/.<br />
More variability in the stressed position, however, does not mean that articulation<br />
is less precise in stressed positions. On the contrary, it has to be interpreted in the way