VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
ms) and VOT between sp127 and sp180. However, statistically significant differences
with respect to closure duration were observed. Therefore, the results have not been
pooled together.
The results obtained for the Standard Austrian German speakers resemble those
obtained for the Central Bavarian speaker: there is a significant negative correlation
between vowel duration and plosive duration (r = -0.41, p = 0.00 for speaker sp180 and
r = -0.58, p = 0.00 for speaker sp127), i.e. vowel duration does not increase with de-
creasing plosive duration. However, in the same way as for the Central Bavarian
speaker, isochrony can be observed for the categories “long vowel + lenis plosive” and
“short vowel + fortis plosive”. The remaining two categories do not, however, fit into
this pattern (see Figure 4.4 and 4.5). Conducted t-tests proved no statistically significant
differences between the durations of the categories “long vowel + lenis plosive” and
“short vowel + fortis plosive” for both speaker sp180 (n = 70, t = 1,36, p = 0.09) and
speaker sp127 (n = 70, t = 0.003, p = 0.50) 59 .
In the same way as for the Central Bavarian speaker, isochrony is no longer
present in spontaneous speech. Durations of the categories “long vowel + lenis plosive”
and “short vowel + fortis plosive” differ considerably, and the category “short vowel +
fortis plosive” is again longer than the category “long vowel + lenis plosive”, as
becomes apparent from Tables 4.2 and 4.3.
59 The category “short vowel + lenis plosive” shows no statistically significant differences
either. Therefore, it is mainly the category “long vowel + fortis plosive” which does not
fit. However, the former category plays only a marginal role in the lexicon of German,
whereas the latter category is, from a quantitative point of view, highly important.