‘Grandpa’ or ‘opera’? Production and perception of unstressed /a/ and /əʁ/ in German

Tamara Rathcke,Christine Mooshammer

doi:10.1017/s0025100320000110

Abstract

In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German.

Highlights

Unstressed vowels are known to be prone to reduction of phonetic qualities (Lindblom 1963, Mooshammer & Geng 2008) and to be affected by neutralisation of phonemic contrasts (Crosswhite 2004, Padgett & Tabain 2005)
A Lobanov vowel normalisation was applied to the formant data, in order to pool across male and female speakers (Adank, Smits & van Hout 2004)
Since F1 is known to inversely correlate with the degree of jaw opening and tongue lowering (e.g. Lindblom & Sundberg 1971), this result suggests that both unstressed vowels were produced with a less open jaw and a higher tongue position than the stressed [a]

Summary

Introduction

Unstressed vowels are known to be prone to reduction of phonetic qualities (Lindblom 1963, Mooshammer & Geng 2008) and to be affected by neutralisation of phonemic contrasts (Crosswhite 2004, Padgett & Tabain 2005). Neutralisation has been documented in pre-rhotic contexts due to the type of /r/ that follows the vowel (Lawson, Scobbie & Stuart-Smith 2013). The neutralisation process affects three originally distinct checked vowels of Scottish English and is likely to have been triggered by coarticulation with the following bunched /r/ that exerts a stronger coarticulatory force over the preceding vowel than a front-tongue raised /r/. Speakers with the front-tongue raised /r/ often derhoticise, most likely due to delayed anterior tongue gestures (Lawson, Stuart-Smith & Scobbie 2018).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion