Differentiation and variability of tongue positioning in the production of German vowels

Abstract

Tongue‐palate distances in repeated productions of German vowels were measured using glossometry. A male native speaker from northern Germany produced 10 tokens each of the 15 stressed monophthongs of German in the carrier phrase ob er /bVp/ habe. Tongue configurations for pairs of vowels were considered sufficiently differentiated if the mean (unsigned) distance between tongue positions exceeded 1.0 mm. For seven pairs of German vowels, tongue positions were not clearly differentiated. American English vowels, however, were produced with nonoverlapping tongue configurations in a related study [Flege et al., Lang. Speech 29, 361–388 (1986)]. The difference between English and German may be largely due to the different mechanism used by these languages to differentiate their large vowel inventories. The overall mean s.d., associated with 10 repetitions for the 15 target positions was 0.8 mm. This measure of variability of tongue positioning is virtually the same as for American English and Spanish vowels in previous studies [J. E. Flege, Lang. Speech 32, 123–147 (1989)], suggesting that neither differences in inventory size nor different mechanisms used to differentiate large vowel inventories affect the precision of tongue positioning. [Work supported by NIH Grant 20963.]