14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

The Influence of the Tense-Lax Contrast in Vowels on the Production of Post-Vocalic Consonants in Standard German

David Restle (1), Christine Mooshammer (2)

(1) Ludwig–Maximilians–Universität München, Germany
(2) ZAS – Research centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany

The contrast between tense vowels and their lax counterparts in Standard German can be characterized as a difference in the intra- syllabic temporal organization, namely the degree of overlap of articulatorily defined opening and closing gestures.
   This study, motivated by the inconsistency of acoustic data on consonant duration, looks for articulatory reflexes of a difference in the degree of coupling between consonantal closing and opening gestures, which would mirror the coupling contrast found in the vocalic area.
   Articulatory data of four native speakers were recorded by means of EMMA. Only two subjects showed evidence for a loose coupling of closing and opening gestures after lax vowels in accordance with the hypothesis of a negative correlation. The underlying control of consonantal coupling seems to lie in a shortening/lengthening of the holding phase and not, as for vocalic gestures, in a difference of gestural organization.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Restle, David / Mooshammer, Christine (1999): "The influence of the tense-lax contrast in vowels on the production of post-vocalic consonants in standard German", In ICPhS-14, 531-534.