Vowel and consonant quantity in Southern German varieties

Previous studies have shown a relationship between diachronic change and synchronic variation, language acquisition, and internal and external factors. In this proposal we explore these issues in an investigation of the (in)stability of quantity relations in vowel plus consonant (VC) sequences in Southern German standard varieties and dialects using a wide range of diverse methods. While Swiss German quantity relations have been relatively stable through time (maintaining both a vowel and a consonant length contrast in present-day varieties), the Old High German consonant length contrast has been lost in Standard German, and in Central Bavarian varieties vowel and consonant length are now in complementary distribution. Moreover, this Bavarian VC timing pattern appears to be changing, presumably due to dialect leveling. The present proposal embraces the opportunity to examine this prosodic change in progress and to compare the unstable timing patterns with more stable patterns found in other varieties with a large-scale apparent-time study. The main aim is to contribute to a better understanding of prosodic changes in the languages of the world by modeling the conditions under which timing patterns change diachronically. Four specific aims form part of the proposal: (1) to develop a typology of quantities in Southern German varieties that takes into account dialects as well as the three national standard varieties; (2) to further investigate the prosodic change in progress in Bavarian and to model the circumstances that lead some varieties to undergo prosodic changes while others do not; (3) to examine the influence of internal factors (e.g. speech rate) and external factors (e.g. language attitudes) on synchronic variation in the production-perception-relationship in adults; (4) to study the development of timing patterns during first language acquisition and whether some of the synchronic variation observed in children can be attributed to sound change. The innovation of the proposal is in the large-scale cross-linguistic apparent-time study that includes children of different ages, the combination of articulatory, acoustical, and auditory methods, and the consideration of both social and phonetic factors. The proposed project links methods for acoustic and sociophonetic analyses of timing patterns in Austrian varieties established at the ARI (Vienna) with acoustic, perceptual and physiological methods for studying the production-perception-relation in German speakers of different ages developed at the IPS (Munich) as well as with the typology-based methods for quantifying Swiss varieties established at the Phonetics Laboratory (Zurich). This collaboration will form part of a long-term project which aims to develop a model of quantity stability, acquisition and linguistic change that integrates experimental data for the internal and external factors to be investigated in the proposal.

The project's overall concept and goal was to give insight in the timing of vowel and consonant sequences in southern German varieties, with a focus on two varieties of Vienna. The first empirical descriptions trace back to more than 100 years, and there have been several studies implying a sound change in the varieties of Vienna. We gathered data, to compare and update the historical descriptions and also re-evaluate the timing we find. Our data gives reliable insight in a sound change in progress that destabilizes the timing system in the varieties of Vienna. Its advancing the research field as it shows the huge differences closely related varieties can display on the suprasegmental level. Furthermore, it increased the importance of describing regional standard varieties as we showed that they might differ to a greater extent than assumed. We analyzed the impact of initial and final consonant clusters in monosyllabic words on the assumed relationship of vowel + consonant sequences. Thus, we included 18 speakers from three Bavarian varieties. The results showed that in all examined varieties long vowel + fortis consonants occur and that the cluster complexity has no influence on the absolute vowel duration, contradicting Pfalz's Law which states that a long vowel is always followed by a lenis consonant, and a short vowel is always followed by a fortis consonant. This analysis was extended by also taking the speaking rate into account. We could show that speaking rate has a different effect on the two investigated varieties, Viennese Standard (VS) and Viennese dialect (VD). In a cross-linguistic study of our data from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland we furthermore investigated the temporal organization of short vs. long vowels (V vs. V:) with following lenis vs. fortis (C vs. C:) stops in the three major varieties of Standard German (Austrian, German, and Swiss). A total of 51 speakers of the three varieties participated in a production and perception experiment. Acoustic analyses revealed that Austrian speakers take up an intermediate position regarding a stop duration contrast which was clearly present in Swiss but absent in German speakers. Another important part of the project consists in the creation of the speech corpus, which is the basis of our analyses and also a valuable resource for future analyses. We performed acoustic recordings of 38 speakers in Vienna in ARI's recording studio, recording a set of given sentences. Up to now the total corpus of the whole DACH project contains a total of 56,870 real and 14,520 non-sense words embedded in carrier phrases produced at normal and fast speech rates by a total of 121 adult speakers distributed evenly across the three countries Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.