VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
the same way: listeners discriminated tense and lax vowel pairs much better when
temporal information was additionally available in the silence center stimuli 58 . The
vowel chart presented in Sendlmeier (1981: 302) only displays spectral differences in
one dimension (either F1 or F2) for those vowels, which were judged primarily for
duration, whereas the other vowels, which were judged on the basis of spectral
differences, differ for both F1 and F2.
In Swedish, a language which also discerns long/tense vs. short/lax vowels
(Schaeffler & Wretling 2002), on the other hand, listeners contrast the vowel pairs /i:/-/ç/
and /o:/-/O/ primarily on the basis of durational information, whereas they use additional
spectral information for the pair /A:/-/a/ (Behne et al. 1999). Schaeffler & Wretling
(2002), who compared long and short /a/ in Northern Swedish dialects, proved the
hypothesis that stronger quality differences only go along with minor durational
differences and vice versa for some dialects.
No spectral information is used for the discrimination of long and short vowel
pairs in Japanese (Behne et al. 1999), although vowel duration is not robust across
speech styles (Kozasa 2002) and spectral differences can be observed (Hirata &
Tsukada 2004). In discriminating long vs. short vowels in Japanese, listeners make use
of word/vowel ratios, which proved to be very stable across speech styles (Hirata 2004).
Therefore, the primary feature contrasting vowel pairs in a given language can
either be a temporal or a spectral one. The respective other – secondary – feature might
or might not be made relevant, when the other either fails to convey the required
opposition or starts to become neutralized. Perception tests reveal that Japanese and
Swedish contrast their vowels along a temporal dimension. The primary contrastive
feature therefore is [± long]. In English and German, on the other hand, listeners
primarily use spectral information to contrast the vowels. Vowel duration only becomes
relevant when spectral information is blurred. Therefore, it can be concluded that
58 The main aim of the Strange & Bohn (1998) study was to test the relevance of dynamic
information in the perception of coarticulated vowels.
58