VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
It becomes apparent from Tables 4.12 – 4.14 that the opposition between the pair /i/ – /ç/
in stressed positions is fully maintained in the logatome reading task. It is also fully
maintained in stressed positions in the task of reading sentences by five of the speakers.
However, the opposition in stressed positions starts to be neutralized in spontaneous
speech for all speakers except speaker 129. Figure 4.11 summarizes the results of the
statistical analysis:
Figure 4.11: Results of the one-tailed t-tests for the vowel pair /i/ – /ç/. For each formant and
each speaking task, statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) are indicated by
crossbeams. Where no differences occur for a given formant, the space is left
blank. Legend as in Table 4.12.
Figure 4.11 shows that only two speakers distinguish the vowel pair in the stressed
position in spontaneous speech; speaker sp129 distinguishes them by all three formants
and speaker sp126 only by F1. In the unstressed positions, the vowel pair is, if at all,
only discerned by F1. The cluster analysis presented for speaker sp012 illustrates the
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