ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06

5pSC20. Acoustic specification of North German vowels produced in citation and sentence contexts.

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.]