Acoustic and articulatory manifestations of vowel reduction in German (original) (raw)
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The acoustic consequences of the articulatory reduction of consonants remain largely unknown. Much more is known about acoustic vowel reduction. Whether the acoustical and perceptual consequences of articulatory consonant reduction are comparable in kind and extent to the consequences of vowel reduction is still an open question. In this study we compare acoustic data for 791 VCV realizations, containing 17 Dutch intervocalic consonants and 13 vowels, extracted from read speech from a single male speaker, to otherwise identical segments isolated from spontaneous speech. Five acoustic correlates of reduction were studied. Acoustic tracers of articulation were based on F 2 slope dierences and locus equations. Speech eort was assessed by measuring duration, spectral balance, and the intervocalic sound energy dierence of consonants. On a global level, it shows that consonants reduce acoustically like vowels on all investigated accounts when the speaking style becomes informal or syllables become unstressed. Methods that are sensitive to speech eort proved to be more reliable indicators of reduction than F 2 based measures. On a more detailed level there are dierences related to the type of consonant. The acoustic results suggest that articulatory reduction will decrease the intelligibility of consonants and vowels in comparable ways.
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De Gruyter eBooks, 2002
was supported by German Research Council projects TI 69/29 (speech-rate corpus) and GWZ 4/5-A1 (accent corpus). We are indebted to Christian Kroos and Barbara Kühnert for their collaboration on the first project and to Suse Fuchs and Daniel Pape on the second. Regina Petermann carried out the intrinsic pitch measurements as part of an M.A Thesis 'Untersuchungen zur intrinsischen Grundfrequenz unter Berücksichtigung mittsagittaler Aufzeichnungen deutscher Vokale'. Thanks also to Peter Auer, Peter Gilles and Helmut Spiekermann for comments on the manuscript. Many of the publications giving further details of the results presented here can be downloaded from: http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/\~hoole.
Speaker‐specific kinematic properties of alveolar reductions in English and German
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2004
A simultaneous EPG/EMA study of tongue gestures of five speakers was conducted to investigate the kinematic events accompanying alveolar stop reductions in the context of a velar plosive /k/ and in the context of a laryngeal fricative /h/ in two languages, English and German. No systematic language differences could be detected. Alveolar productions before a following /h/ showed only a marginal weakening of the formation of complete occlusion, while alveolar productions before a following /k/ showed a wide range of reductions, including instances of a complete deletion of the alveolar gesture. The extension of movement reduction varied between and within subjects. Importantly, while speakers were consistent with themselves, they employed different articulatory patterns with respect to the timing relationship between movement initiation, overall movement duration, peak velocity as well as closure duration. An attempt is made to relate the observed movement patterns to the dynamic factors of the speech mechanism.
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Speakers communicate pragmatic and discourse meaning through the prosodic form assigned to an utterance, and listeners must attend to the acoustic cues to prosodic form to fully recover the speaker's intended meaning. While much of the research on prosody examines supra-segmental cues such as F0 and temporal patterns, prosody is also known to affect the phonetic properties of segments as well. This paper reports on the effect of prosodic prominence on the formant patterns of vowels using speech data from the Buckeye corpus of spontaneous American English. A prosody annotation was obtained for a subset of this corpus based on the auditory perception of 97 ordinary, untrained listeners. To understand the relationship between prominence perception and formant structure, as a measure of the 'strength' of the vowel articulation, we measure the steady-state first and second formants of stressed vowels at vowel mid-points for monophthongs and at both 10% (nucleus) and 90% (glide) positions for diphthongs.
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The tense and lax vowels of German were compared, based on an analysis of the duration, amplitude and velocity characteristics of lip and tongue movement.,This study,examined ,firstly whether ,they ,show ,different patterns of compression over changes in speech rate, and secondly,whether,velocity profiles would reveal evidence ofdifferent,underlying ,control ,mechanisms. ,CVC movements were segmented into CV, nucleus and VC portions. Speech