VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
unstressed position. The male speakers are discriminated with respect to the vowels /A/,
/E/, and /o/ in stressed position, and /A/ and /E/ in unstressed position. Although F3 has
the highest discriminatory power, as has already be stated by others (Jessen 1997), the
results of F3 are still too unreliable for discrimination. The vowel which renders a
consistent result is the vowel /A/, followed by some front vowels. However, as concerns
the other vowels, one never knows how they will behave with respect to speaker
discrimination. Therefore, as long as one has to rely on casuistry, vowels cannot be
pooled for speaker discrimination.
This holds also for vowels controlled for phonetic context. Figure 7.2 presents the
density plot for all /i/ – vowels from the word “Wien” (Vienna).
c(xmin, xmax)
0.000 0.002 0.004 0.006 0.008
1500 2000 2500 3000 3500
Index
Figure 7.2: Density plot of F2 and F3 of the vowel /i/ from “Wien” (Vienna), spontaneous
speech. Red: speaker sp012, black: speaker sp126, blue: speaker sp127, n = 22.