VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
that more information is given by finely tuning several levels of stressed positions. The
weakest prosodic positions are not differentiated that much (see 6.6.3).
“Now in languages with “phonemic stress” ( ≈ stress-timed languages) synchronic obscuration
processes are maximized in unstressed syllables (and syllable-finally), clarification
processes are maximized in stressed syllables (and word-initially), thus allowing more
sounds in stressed than in unstressed syllables.” (Dressler 1979: 268).
6.6. Prosodic analysis of variability
In 6.5, it has been argued that identical context and identical sentence/utterance position
of a given segment bears some invariance, insofar as the quality of a given segment
experiences less variability than phonologically identical segments in different
sentence/utterance positions. So far, little has been said about the quality of the changes
and why they occur.
6.6.1. Duration
There is general agreement that prosodic strength is responsible for the qualitative
changes of phonologically identical segments. Phonemes in stressed positions are
articulated differently from the same phonemes in unstressed positions. Since unstressed
positions experience durational shortenings as well 131 , the changes observed in
unstressed positions are usually termed “reduction”. As compared to stressed positions,
unstressed positions are shorter in Standard Austrian German. Figure 6.8 shows the
distribution of the durations, measured in number of periods (NoP), for all stressed and
unstressed vowels in the sentence reading task of speaker sp082:
131 Crystal & House (1988a) found a difference of more than 60 ms for stressed vs. unstressed
vowels in American English. However, Podevsa & Adisasmito-Smith (1999)
observed longer durations in unstressed positions for two speakers of Buginese, which
they attributed to final lengthening.
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