VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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71<br />
Vowels in Standard Austrian German<br />
It becomes evident from Table 4.7 that the NoP ratio, and consequently the NoP, are a<br />
function of speaking tasks and prosodic position, i.e. the more informal the speaking<br />
task and the weaker the prosodic position, the less differences can be observed between<br />
tense/long and lax/short vowels with respect to NoP 64 . In reading logatomes, tense/long<br />
vowels are nearly twice as long as their lax/short counterparts. The results presented in<br />
Iivonen (1987b) give a still higher ratio, namely 2.2. Given the dependence of the ratio<br />
on speech style and prosodic position, the higher ratio observable in Iivonen’s study is<br />
the result of a still more formal speech style: a list of isolated monosyllabics vs.<br />
bisyllabic logatomes in carrier sentences 65 .<br />
It has been observed in many languages, including Standard German (Antoniadis<br />
& Strube 1984, Strange & Bohn 1998) that duration depends on vowel height and is<br />
considered to be a phonetic universal (Maddieson 1997). However, this could not be<br />
observed in Standard Austrian German. In the two reading tasks, one-way ANOVA<br />
rendered statistically significant differences between the vowels (“tense” and “lax”<br />
vowels treated separately), in spontaneous speech. Only speaker sp127 and speaker<br />
sp180 show statistically significant differences for both vowel groups, and speaker<br />
sp126 only for the “lax” vowels. The crucial point, however, is that the /a/ vowels do<br />
not expose the highest number of periods. Exactly which vowel shows the highest<br />
number of periods, differs from speaker to speaker (/o/ and /a/ for speaker sp082, /y/<br />
and /ï/ for speaker sp129, /u/ and /a/ for speaker sp180, /y/ and /ê/ for speaker sp012,<br />
/A/ and /a/ for speaker sp126, /y/ and /a/ for speaker sp127 in the sentence reading task,<br />
see Table 4.8). Though statistically significant, no meaningful order can be worked out.<br />
Table 4.8. gives an overview of the mean number of periods in the sentence reading task<br />
for all speakers:<br />
64 The same result was achieved by Strange & Bohn (1998) for Northern German.<br />
65 Eberhard Zwirner and his colleagues, who performed large-scaled regional investigations<br />
on vowel durations, found out that in the east and southeast of the German language area<br />
the durational ratio was only 1.1, whereas the ratio continously increases to the west and<br />
the north and finally arrives at 2 in Bremen (Zwirner 1962, cited after Sendlmeier 1985).