VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
stressed and unstressed conditions for the non-low vowels; vowel duration, however, is
statistically significant only in stressed vowel conditions, but not in unstressed
conditions. As concerns vowel duration, the low vowels behave in the same way as the
non-low vowels (distinctive in stressed positions, not distinctive in unstressed
positions), but show no difference in vowel quality. Jessen et al. (1995) conclude that
the low vowels contrast in quantity, whereas the others contrast in quality. Their
findings are in agreement with earlier studies (Ramers 1988, Iivonen 1984, Kohler
1995 2 ). A later study based on the Kiel Corpus also corroborate these results (Kohler
1998). The perceptual experiments conducted by Sendlmeier (1981) proved the
relevance of temporal information for the vowel pairs /a, a:/, /ç, e:/, /Y, ë:/ and /ï, o:/. In
order to discriminate these pairs, temporal information was used by listeners in
Sendlmeier’s study, whereas for the discrimination of the remaining pairs, spectral
information was applied. Nevertheless, on the basis of these experiments, Sendlmeier
(1981, 1985) concludes that a primary quantitative opposition can without doubt be
assumed for the pair /a, a:/, whereas for the vowel pairs /ç, e:/ and /ï, o:/,
“scheint es ebenfalls gerechtfertigt, eine phonologisch relevante Quantitätsopposition zu etablieren.
Die die Differenzierung unterstützende Funktion eines vorhandenen Qualitätsunterschiedes
spielt für diese Vokalpaare jedoch eine wichtigere Rolle als bei den beiden A-
Lauten.” (Sendlmeier 1985: 194)
For the remaining pairs, spectral information was used for discrimination. Sendlmeier’s
results corroborate the hypothesis of Bennett (1968) on German and English, that the
importance of duration is inversely proportional to the distance in quality a certain
vowel pair exhibits: i.e. the smaller the distance in quality, the higher the importance of
duration. An additional test on a pair of back, unrounded vowels [V] and [Ó:], which
occur neither in German nor in English, revealed that German subjects used primarily
spectral information for discrimination. Sawusch (1996), in his study on the perception
of the vowels [E] vs. [é:] in “head” and “had”, could show that duration becomes an
identifying cue when other sources of information were made ambiguous. The results of
Strange & Bohn (1998) on the perception of North German vowels can be interpreted in