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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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In Standard German tense and lax vowels are affected by stress in
different ways: Tense vowels are lengthened whereas the
duration of lax vowels stays relatively constant. Both the variation
of stress and tenseness can be attributed to a truncation of
the opening gesture. The first aim of this study is to compare
acoustical and kinematic parameters of these effects. Analyses of
the durations revealed the same degree of truncation for tense
unstressed and lax stressed vowels.
The second aim concerns vowel targets. It is still a subject of
debate whether the tenseness contrast holds only in stressed
syllables or is neutralized in unstressed syllables. Therefore we
analyzed quality differences by means of formant frequencies and
Canonical Discriminant Analysis of positional data of tongue,
jaw and lower lip. With the exception of the low vowel /a/ no
overlap between unstressed tense and lax vowels could be
observed.
Bibliographic reference. Mooshammer, Christine / Fuchs, Susanne / Fischer, Dirk (1999): "Effects of stress and tenseness on the production of CVC syllables in German", In ICPhS-14, 409-412.