Acoustic and articulatory manifestations of vowel reduction in German

Abstract

Recent phonological approaches incorporate phonetic principles in the motivation of phonological regularities, e.g. vowel reduction and neutralization in unstressed position by target undershoot. So far, evidence for this hypothesis is based on impressionistic and acoustic data but not on articulatory data. The major goal of this study is to compare formant spaces and lingual positions during the production of German vowels for combined effects of stress, accent and corrective contrast. In order to identify strategies for vowel reduction independent of speaker-specific vocal-tract anatomies and individual biomechanical properties, an approach similar to the Generalized Procrustes Analysis was applied to formant spaces and lingual vowel target positions. The data basis consists of the German stressed and unstressed full vowels /i… I y… Y e… E E… P… { a… a o… O u… U/ from seven speakers recorded by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMMA). Speaker normalized articulatory and formant spaces gave evidence for a greater degree of coarticulation with the consonant context for unstressed vowels as compared to stressed vowels. However, only for tense vowels could spatial reduction patterns be attributed to vowel shortening, whereas lax vowels were reduced without shortening. The results are discussed in the light of current theories of vowel reduction, i.e. target undershoot, Adaptive Dispersion Theory and Prominence Alignment.

What exactly is a front rounded vowel? An acoustic and articulatory investigation of thenursevowel in South Wales English

“…As a result, any spectral differences found in relation to the NURSE vowel in SWE and SSBE as well as /ø…/ in SG are not due to variations in vocal tract shape, but constitute 'real' phonetic differences across the three varieties. With respect to the latter vowels, the values reported here are in line with previous accounts of SG (Mooshammer & Geng 2008) and SSBE (Deterding 1997). 6 To determine whether the mean formant frequency values differ significantly across the three groups, a series of one-way ANOVAs was carried out.…”

“…House 1961, Antoniadis & Strube 1984, Whitworth 2003, Mooshammer & Geng 2008. To determine whether the mean vowel duration values differ significantly across the three groups, a one-way ANOVA was carried out.…”

The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

“…In the deaccented context, there was a greater overlap between /a, aː/ that was primarily caused by a shift of the /aː/ distribution towards /a/. This is in line with findings from Mooshammer and Fuchs (2002) and Mooshammer and Geng (2008) that prosodic weakening shortens tense but not lax vowels. There was (to our surprise) no evidence that vowel duration was shorter in the disyllabic vs. monosyllabic contexts.…”

“…The opposition between lax /a/ and tense /aː/ in German is characterised predominantly by length (Heike 1972) and to a lesser extent quality differences (Mooshammer and Geng 2008;Harrington et al 2011). There is also some evidence to show that German lax vowels can be modelled as similar to tense vowels but truncated by an earlier timing of the closing consonant (Vennemann 1991;Hoole and Mooshammer 2002).…”

Acoustic and laryngographic measures of the laryngeal reflexes of linguistic prominence and vocal effort in German

“…It is premature to conclude that spectral tilt is an independent correlate of word stress taking into account that some studies were not able to find a measure of spectral slope that could be generalized across different vowel types, vowel realizations, and f0. In German, as in many languages, the reduction in weak syllables comes about both because they are more strongly co-articulated with the adjacent sounds ͑e.g., Mooshammer and Geng, 2008 for German͒ and because they are more centralized in formant space. In our data, F3 was affected more by stress ͑/e/ strong = 2713 Hz, /e/ weak = 2504 Hz͒ than by vocal effort ͑/e/ loud = 2761 Hz, /e/ normal = 2713, /e/ soft = 2726͒ ͑see also Traunmüller and Eriksson, 2000͒.…”