VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
In Figure 6.9, the overall results of the differences between stressed and
unstressed vowels are presented. For each formant which showed a statistically
significant difference between unstressed and stressed vowels of a given category, the
difference (in %) was calculated per speaker. Results were root-squared, in order to
eliminate negative values. Per vowel and speaker, the statistically significant differences
of F1, F2, and F3 were added up. One-tailed t-tests were calculated in order to find out
whether the discriminatory power is greater in the sentence reading task as compared to
spontaneous speech. For most vowels, the discriminatory power of the sentence reading
task did not exceed the discriminatory power of spontaneous speech. The majority of
the vowels showed no statistically significant differences. The discriminatory power of
the sentence reading task is greater for the vowels /e/ and /u/, whilst the discriminatory
power of spontaneous speech is greater for the vowel /i/ (see Figure 6.9).
Difference stressed - unstressed (in %)
50,000
45,000
40,000
35,000
30,000
25,000
20,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
0,000
/i/ c /i/* uc /e/* c /e/ uc /u/* c /u/ uc /o/ c /o/ uc /a/
reading task 27,412 8,934 37,298 23,697 46,780 24,963 35,467 28,171 31,825
spontaneous 25,521 16,409 24,539 19,002 23,197 20,564 30,693 20,963 28,696
Figure 6.9: Sum of the statistically significant differences (in %) of F1, F2, and F3 between
stressed and unstressed vowels, pooled over all speakers. The asterisk indicates a
statistically significant difference (p < 0.02) between the two speaking tasks.
Legend: c = [+constricted], uc = [–constricted].
204