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Abstract:The study tests a model of sound change based on how prosodic weakening affects shortening in polysyllabic words. Twenty-nine L1-German speakers produced minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in both monosyllables /zakt, zaːkt/ and disyllables /zaktə, zaːktə/. The target words were produced in accented and deaccented contexts. The duration ratio between the vowel and the following /kt/ cluster was less for lax than tense vowels and less for disyllables than monosyllables. Under deaccentuation, there was an approximation of tense and lax vowels towards each other but no influence due to the mono-vs. disyllabic difference. On the other hand, Gaussian /a/ vs. /aː/ classifications of these data showed a lesser influence due to the syllable count in deaccented words. Compatibly, when the same speakers as listeners classified synthetic sackt-sagt and sackte-sagte continua, they were shown to compensate for the syllable count differences, but to a lesser extent in a deaccented context. Deaccentuation may therefore provide the conditions for sound change to take place by which /aː/ shortens in polysyllabic words; it may do so because the association between coarticulation and the source that gives rise to it is hidden to a greater extent than in accented contexts.

We consider how lexical stress and phrasal accent influence the acoustic realization of cues to phonological voicing in German plosives. 22 native speakers of Standard German were recorded producing a total of 3168 utterances in both strong (stressed/focused) and weak (unstressed/unfocused) prosodic contexts, while holding prosodic domain constant. Both Voice Onset Time (VOT) and obstruent-intrinsic F0 (CF0) were analyzed. We found that differences in the magnitude of CF0 between voiced and voiceless plosives were greatest in the strong prosodic context, but were not always obliterated in the weak prosodic context. However, individual differences were also observed, with speakers broadly patterning into four groups with respect to the interaction of micro-and macroprosody. VOT differences were also more pronounced in strong prosodic contexts. We consider the implications of our findings for sound changes involving the reanalysis of obstruent-intrinsic F0.

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