VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
7. Speaker-specific traits
Throughout the analysis on vowels in Standard Austrian German, speaker-specific traits
emerged. These especially showed up in the dealing with variation, but speaker-specific
traits also occurred in the phonemic representation ([±constricted] vs. [±open]).
Therefore, if one wants to look at speaker-specific traits, one has to go into detail.
Approaches which pool together all vowels (Grigoras & Nolan 2005) 157 , run the risk of
blurring most of the speaker-specific information and might arrive at correspondences
where there are none. For example, one-way ANOVA calculated over all stressed
vowels of spontaneous speech renders no differences between the three male speakers
for F2 (F2,371 = 0.33, p = 0.72). As regards F3, differences show up for speaker sp127,
but none between sp012 and sp126. F1 renders no differences between speaker sp012
and sp127, but differences for speaker sp126. Given the fact that in true forensic cases,
F1 can hardly ever be mobilised because of the frequency band limitation of the
telephone (see Künzel 2001 and Nolan 2002 on the usability of formants in speaker
identification), an analysis of the three male speakers would result in a correspondence
of speaker sp012 and speaker126. As concerns the female speakers, all three speakers
differ for F1, but, again, two speakers (sp129 and sp082) cannot be kept apart with
respect to F2 and F3 in spontaneous speech.
The situation is slightly better for the unstressed vowels of spontaneous speech.
All three male speakers are kept apart via F3. As concerns F2, speakers sp126 and
sp127 are differentiated, whilst speaker sp012 is not. The three female speakers are kept
apart by F1, F2, and F3. Therefore, as has been pointed out in Moosmüller (2002),
based on the theoretical considerations put forward in Dressler (1979), in forensic
157
Grigoras & Nolan (2005) point out themselves that such an analysis has to be extended by
an additional detailed analysis.
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