Brett H. Fitzgerald
Sonja A. Trent
Janet W. Stack
Xiange Ling
Winifred Strange
Dept. of Commun. Sci. & Disord. and Psychol., Univ. of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620-8150
As part of a larger study of the effects of speech style and consonantal context on the acoustic specification and cross-language perceptual similarity of vowels, this study examined differences in acoustic parameters of North German (NG) vowels in hVp syllables produced in citation-form (as lists) and in the carrier sentence ``Ich habe---gesacht.'' Two instances of each of 14 vowels produced by 4 male speakers (Kiel dialect) spoken in each context were analyzed. Vowel formant frequencies (measured at syllable midpoint) showed some undershoot of F1 in sentence context relative to citation context; F2 undershoot was minimal. Duration differences between spectrally similar tense-lax pairs varied as a function of vowel height in both citation and sentence contexts. Overall, tense-lax duration differences were reduced in sentence context relative to citation form. Individual differences across speakers in both F1/F2 targets and intrinsic durations were noted. Distances in F1/F2 space could not account for perceptual assimilation patterns of AE listeners [see S. Trent et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am., this session]. These results have implications for conceptions of phonetic prototypes used to account for cross-language similarity. [Research supported by NIDCD.]