VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
4.4.1. The pre-palatal vowels
The unrounded pre-palatal vowels are located in an acoustically unstable region.
Probably for this reason, this region is only exploited in vowel systems with many front
vowels. Since German discerns eight front vowels, it is not possible to locate them all in
the mid-palatal region with five distinctive vowel heights. It is, in principle, possible to
discern five vowel heights. However, tongue-palate distance differences depend on
speaking tasks, situations, and prosodic positions as well (e.g., in weak prosodic
positions, tongue-palate distance becomes greater). This stepwise increase of tongue-
palate distance per vowel in dependence on speaking task and prosodic position would
ultimately lead to a collapse of the feature tongue height, in cases where all front vowels
were located in the same place.
As has been elaborated in Chapter 2, the pre-palatal location might cause a switch
in cavity affiliation for F2 and F3, where constriction degree is small and constriction
length is sufficiently long (approximately 5 cm). This vocal tract configuration causes
F3 to raise substantially and approximate F4 (see Figure 4.8).
Figure 4.8: Averaged spectrum of the vowel /i/ taken from the logatome “piebe”, speaker
sp012.
However, a configuration resulting in a spectrum like the one displayed in Figure 4.8
takes place at best in the most formal speech situations or speaking tasks. As soon as the
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