Complementary length in vowel–consonant sequences: Acoustic and perceptual evidence for a sound change in progress in Bavarian German

Abstract

This study is concerned with the Bavarian German dialect feature of complementary length in vowel plus consonant sequences according to which tense (long) vowels always precede lenis stops (short closure) and lax (short) vowels always precede fortis stops (long closure). The study investigates whether a vowel length contrast is developing before fortis stops due to dialect leveling. We measured vowel and consonant duration in trochaic words differing only in vowel length which were read by 40 older and younger Bavarian and Saxon (control group) German speakers. Older Bavarians distinguished tense and lax vowels by means of vowel to vowel plus consonant ratios that indicate an inverse timing pattern. Saxons and younger Bavarians signal the tense–lax distinction independently of the following stop length. A perception test showed that this sound change in progress also affects perception. We argue for a contact-induced change which is triggered by external as opposed to internal factors.

Modelling multi-modal integration -- The case of the McGurk effect

“…It has been found that the percentage of fused responses is higher when stimuli are voiced than when they are voiceless (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976;Sekiyama & Tohkura, 1991) (but see Sekiyama et al (1995) for a reversed finding); percentage of fused responses is highest for plosive stimuli, intermediate for fricatives and lowest for sonorants (Sekiyama et al, 1995;Massaro & Cohen, 1995) (but see Paré et al (2003) for a reversed finding). Knowing that the arisal of the McGurk effect strongly depends on the temporal synchronization of the articulatory and the auditory signal (Hertrich et al, 2009), these findings make perfect sense as different manners of articulation, as well as voicing change the temporal patterns of the speech signal (for complementary vowel length see Kleber, 2017).…”

On the Role of Temporal Variability in the Acquisition of the German Vowel Length Contrast

“…A subset of the children's data was compared to the production data of a group of ten young adults (8 female) from the same regional area (Munich and surrounding areas) that were obtained for a previous study [14]. In this study speakers were asked to read out loud a total of 10 times 46 different words each presented in isolation and in randomized order on a computer screen in a moderate voice and tempo.…”

“…The continnuum used for this perception experiment was taken from a previous study on the perception of the combined vowel length and voicing contrast in German [14] and slightly modified for the current study. Originally, the continuum spanned the words Hagen (/ha:g@n/, the name of a German city and a male name) to Haken to hacken.…”

“…where V dur is the duration of the vowel and Clos dur the duration of the postvocalic velar stop's closure phase. The stimulus specific VCratios are given in Table 1 (see [14] for further details on stimulus creation). VCratio has been shown to be a relevant perceptual cue both to the voicing [19] and the vowel length contrast [14] with VCratios above and below 0.5 being indicative of long and short vowels, respectively.…”

“…The stimulus specific VCratios are given in Table 1 (see [14] for further details on stimulus creation). VCratio has been shown to be a relevant perceptual cue both to the voicing [19] and the vowel length contrast [14] with VCratios above and below 0.5 being indicative of long and short vowels, respectively. The aforementioned modifications of the stimuli were such that the first segment /h/ was cut out in each stimulus in praat ( [20], version 5.0.27) leaving disyllbic /VC@n/ stimuli.…”