Development of voice onset time in an ongoing phonetic differentiation in Austrian German plosives: Reversing a near-merger

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Sound change in the form of plosive mergers has been reported for a variety of languages and is the result of a reduction of phonetic distance between two (or more) sounds. The present study is concerned with the opposite development of phonetic differentiation in plosives (akin to a phonetic split), a less commonly reported phenomenon that is taking place in Austrian German at the moment. A previously small (or null) phonetic distinction between fortis and lenis plosives – a presumed near-merger – is gradually developing into a clear phonetic contrast in younger speakers. In the present study, voice onset time of word-initial plosives was measured in two generations of Austrian speakers (born in the middle and at the end of the 20th century), yielding an ongoing phonetic differentiation where the voice onset time of lenis consonants is shortened while, at the same time, that of fortis consonants is lengthened. These results present an insight into the recent diachronic development of Austrian German and the changes in plosive production that are currently taking place.</jats:p>

Phonological neighborhood complexity and sound change

“…The present study This study investigates a recent sound change in Austrian German from the viewpoint of lexical processing. As detailed elsewhere (Luef, 2020), a voice onset time (vot) split in word-initial plosives-consisting of the introduction of shortened lenis vot s (referred to as the sound change "lenis vot shortening") and an aspiration feature in fortis plosives (referred to as the sound change "fortis vot lengthening" or "aspiration")-unfolded in Austrian German in the second half of the twentieth century. The two sound changes caused previous near-homophones, such as Dank/Tank ('thank'/'tank') or Bass/Pass ('bass'/'passport') to become phonetically discriminated; thus, a near-merger of fortis and lenis onset plosives in older speakers (born in the 1950s or 1960s) has been reversed by a younger generation of Austrian speakers (born in the 1980s or 1990s).…”

“…Older speakers show longer lenis vot s (mean vot across all places of articulation = 17.2 ± 6.1 ms) and shorter fortis vot s (mean vot = 40.8 ± 23 ms) as compared to the younger speakers (mean lenis vot = 8.6 ± 4.4 ms; mean fortis vot = 51.4 ± 17.1 ms), rendering young people's speech more similar to German varieties traditionally spoken in central and northern Germany. The Austrian merger reversal has been quantified in terms of a merge index, which is a measure of lenis length relative to fortis length (Luef, 2020): a merge index of 100 indicates identical vot durations of fortis and lenis plosives, while a merge index of 15 indicates that lenis vot duration is only 15 % of the fortis vot duration. Figure 2 schematizes the merge difference between the two generations of Austrian speakers and illustrates how younger speakers (under 40 years of age) have reversed the merging tendencies of the older generation (over 50).…”

“…This local speech rate estimate of syllables per seconds was then multiplied by each raw vot value in order to arrive at a normalized vot value (see Morgan and Fosler-Lussier, 1998). vot is correlated with education and age in Austrian speakers (Luef, 2020;Moosmüller, 2011) and the samples compared in the present study are equally stratified in terms of the highest level of education achieved by the participants and their ages (see Table 1), foregoing the necessity to adjust vot values for the two factors.…”

Diffusion of Phonetic Updates within Phonological Neighborhoods

“…This puts English fortis VOTs in the low to medium aspiration categories. By contrast, Austrian German (hereinafter referred to as "Austrian") and Czech fortis VOTs range well below the English ones, with Austrian fortis plosives being characterized by VOTs of 26.1-66 ms (Luef 2020;Moosmüller and Ringen 2004). As opposed to Standard Middle/Northern German with moderate degrees of word-initial aspiration (Jessen and Ringen 2002), Austrian German is generally classified as non-aspirated or weakly aspirated in the majority of phonological and stylistic contexts (Bürkle 1995;Muhr 2007;Wiesinger 2009).…”

“…In English, German, and Czech plosives are commonly classified as "fortis" -in the case of longer VOTs -and "lenis", which are characterized by shorter or negative VOTs (Klatt 1975;Skarnitzl 2011;Chodroff et al 2015;Luef 2020). Definitions of long-lag VOT (or fortis) differ between the three languages.…”