Interaction between Phrasal Structure and Vowel Tenseness in German: An Acoustic and Articulatory Study.

ABSTRACT: Phrase-final lengthening affects the segments preceding a prosodic boundary. This prosodic variation is generally assumed to be independent of the phonemic identity. We refer to this as the 'uniform lengthening hypothesis' (ULH). However, in German, lax vowels do not undergo lengthening for word stress or shortening for increased speech rate, indicating that temporal properties might interact with phonemic identity. We test the ULH by comparing the effect of the boundary on acoustic and kinematic measures for tense and lax vowels and several coda consonants. We further examine if the boundary effect decreases with distance from the boundary. Ten native speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) while reading sentences that contained six minimal pairs

SUBMITTER: Belz M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9975821 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature