VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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