VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
duration is only an accompanying, secondary feature. The same conclusion is drawn by
Strange & Bohn (1998) for the high and mid vowels. The low vowels are treated
differently. However, the results presented in Sendlmeier (1981) reveal that the
relevance of temporal information does not depend on vowel height, but rather on the
amount of spectral information available. This strongly points towards neutralization of
certain vowel pairs, especially the low vowels. It can be assumed, in line with the
historical analysis presented in Ronneberger-Sibold (1999), that durational contrasts are
remnants of a former temporal organization. Therefore, it is argued that German
contrasts its vowels with respect to quality, resulting in a vowel set of 13 vowels.
Instead of assuming a different feature for the low vowels, /A:/ and /a/ have been
neutralized in this analysis. The results presented on the Standard Austrian German
vowels will provide additional evidence for such an analysis.
4.2.2. Isochrony in Central Bavarian
According to Ronneberger-Sibold (1999), the Central and North Bavarian dialects
maintain isochrony with the segmental constraint that a long vowel has to be followed
by a lenis plosive and a short vowel has to be followed by a fortis plosive. The
isochrony of the structural units “vowel+consonant” has been tested by Bannert (1977)
and Ronneberger-Sibold (1999).
It is not the objective of the current investigation to test isochrony in the diverse
variants of Central Bavarian. However, since the interaction between Standard Austrian
German and Central Bavarian dialects (in particular the Viennese dialect) is quite
strong, vowel and consonant durations of one Bavarian Dialect speaker (Upper Austria,
region of Wels) have been analysed. This speaker was asked to read the same list of
sentences as the Standard Austrian German subjects. A significant negative correlation
(r = -0.5, p = 0.00) was observed. However, comparing the vowel and plosive durations,
isochrony was observed for the group’s long vowel + lenis plosive and short vowel +