VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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