Perceptual effects of interpolated Austrian and German standard varieties

Abstract

This article focuses on the perception of standard varieties produced by Austrian and German TV newscasters from the perspective of listeners from both countries, Germany and Austria. Thus, the paper's sociolinguistic scope is located in the pluricentric realm. It assesses (the perception of) standard language variation on fine phonetic levels. In addition to naturally produced stimuli (read sentences), “intermediate” samples were generated by means of a two-step interpolation procedure: First, the symbolic phone sequences were aligned with a Levenshtein-distance algorithm. Second, a phone-level Dynamic-Time-Warping (DTW) algorithm was applied to align the two utterances on a frame level, taking phoneme boundaries into account. Additionally, the spectrum and the fundamental frequency (F0) contour of the utterances was manipulated to be either interpolated or fixed to a given speaker. This procedure allowed for assessing these features’ contribution to listeners’ judgments of whether a given utterance sounds as if spoken by a speaker from (rather) Germany or (rather) Austria. Results of the judgment task showed that the interpolated samples were perceived in a continuous fashion, similarly by both groups, and with overall greater reliance on spectral than F0 information. These findings suggest that even fine phonetic differences between Standard German from Germany and Austria are recognized and evaluated by listeners from both countries. An overall bias towards perceiving all speech samples as closer to the listeners’ own national standard points to a factor of familiarity with one's own and uncertainty towards the ‘foreign’ standard. The similar degree of this bias indicates that both groups have similar levels of familiarity with their own and uncertainty about the other standard variety.