Yuen, Ivan; Andreeva, Bistra; Ibrahim, Omnia; Möbius, Bernd
Differential effects of word frequency and utterance position on the duration of tense and lax vowels in German
Proc. Speech Prosody 2024 (Leiden, The Netherlands), pp. 442-446, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2024.
Acoustic duration is subject to modification from multiple sources, for example, utterance position [13] and predictability such as occurrence frequency at word and syllable levels [e.g., 2, 3, 4]. A study of German radio corpus data showed that these two sources interact to modify syllable duration. On the one hand, the predictability effect can percolate downstream to the segmental level, and this downstream effect is sensitive to phonological contrasts [9]. On the other, [6] showed that utterance-final lengthening is uniformly applied to tense and lax vowels in German. This then raises some questions as to whether the effects of the two sources of durational variation are uniformly applied or sensitive to phonological contrasts. The current study focused on the duration of tense and lax vowels in the stressed syllable of monosyllabic and disyllabic words in utterance-medial and utterance-final positions. Twenty German speakers participated in a question-answer elicitation task. A preliminary analysis of seven speakers showed effects of utterance position and word frequency, as well as interactions with vowel type, suggesting a non-uniform application of durational adjustments contingent on phonological vowel length. Interestingly, the frequency effect affects the duration of lax vowels, but utterance position affects the duration of tense vowels.