Acoustic and auditory correlates of non-pulmonic sound production in German

Abstract

Different types of non-pulmonic sound production found in read and spontaneous German are described and exemplified. Stop releases driven by a glottalic airstream are found in sequences of final plosive plus glottalized vowel onset. Both ingressive and egressive velaric stop releases are considered to arise from double occlusions involving partial articulatory overlap in sequences of dorsal stop followed by an apical or bilabial stop. Certain aspects of the articulatory and aerodynamic mechanisms involved remain unclear. However, it is argued that an identification of these patterns in the acoustic record alone provides an invaluable insight into aspects of articulatory synchronization in types of spoken language, such as conversation, which are not generally amenable to the more intrusive methods of articulatory analysis.