VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
and speaker sp127 mark secondary stress by a higher F1 as compared to both primary
stress and unstressed positions, which once more contradicts theoretical assumptions.
6.6.3.7. Summary of the results on secondary stress
The most salient result is probably the high variability among the speakers 142 . Any
speaker has his or her own way to indicate secondary stress by changing the spectral
shape of the vowel or by not indicating it at all. Although all speakers seem to agree that
primary stress has to be distinguished from unstressed positions, and in what way this
should occur, the way to deal with secondary stress does not seem to be codified.
However, in spontaneous speech, speakers often reduce the discriminative strength
between primary stress and secondary stress on the one hand, and secondary stress and
unstressed level on the other hand, down to one formant. It can be concluded, therefore,
that a third level exists. Whether and how it is activated, depends on the speaker and on
the speaking task. A secondary stress may either be realized in the same way as the
primary stress, or in the same way as the unstressed position, or as discrete secondary
stress.
6.6.4. Sentence Stress
The analysis of lexical stress already gives a good insight into the way stress affects the
acoustic output of vowels 143 . However, the different relative levels of sentence stress
cannot be captured with a sole differentiation of primary, secondary, and unstressed
levels (Wagner 2002). Via postlexical stress assignment, the degree of lexical stress can
change, providing the respective syllable with either higher or lower prominence.
Moreover, in a string of unstressed syllables, not all syllables may be equally
142 High variablilty among speakers has also been observed by Kleber & Klipphahn (2006).
143 The focus is on vowels. This does not of course mean that consonants are not affected by
stress. Jessen et al. (1995) showed that the closure phase of plosives is longer in a stressed
syllable. The same results were obtained by Cho & McQueen (2005) for Dutch, Heldner
& Strangert (2001) for Swedish, Greenberg et al. (2003) for English.
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