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Abstract:
Initial vowels in German are canonically realized with a
glottal stop. However, spontaneous and read speech data suggest
that at least four realizations are possible: glottal stop with
or without glottalization, glottalization without glottal stop,
and absence of glottal stop and glottalization. This paper
examines the factors that condition the distribution of these
realizations. At least four factors influence the realizations
found: speech style, word class, sentence-accent and position in
the utterance. The distribution of glottalization phenomena may
differ between spontaneous and read speech: because of the formal
recording context, read speech is produced more carefully, but
may also be more fluent and lack disjuncture phenomena. A glottal
stop is expected to be more frequent in content than function
words, partly since function words are mostly unaccented.
Accented vowels, especially sentence-initially or after pause,
breath or hesitation, are expected to be marked by a glottal
stop. The 17000 vowels in this study are from the Kiel Corpora of
Read and Spontaneous Speech, which contain high quality
segmentally and prosodically labelled data. A database prepared
from the corpora is automatically searched for relevant vowels,
which undergo detailed auditory and phonetic analysis. Glottal
stops are more common in read than spontaneous speech, and the
absence of any glottal reflex is more frequent in spontaneous
than read speech. Glottalization without a glottal stop is more
frequent in spontaneous than read speech. A glottal reflex is
more frequent in content than function words: only 10% of content
words feature no glottal reflex, as opposed to 40% of function
words. The influence of sentence accent is also clear: accented
vowels are most frequently marked by a glottal reflex: only 6% of
accented vowels have no glottal reflex. 76% of unaccented vowels
are realized simply with creak or with no glottal reflex
whatsoever. Finally, regardless of sentence accent, a glottal
stop is far more common phrase-initially than -medially. The
traditional account of initial vowels is clearly inadequate, yet
the range of glottal realizations can be explained with recourse
to the interaction of relatively few factors. It must be expanded
to include further glottal phenomena, since the four glottal
categories captured by labels in the Kiel Corpora are
underspecified: accented vowels marked with no glottal reflex
evidence strategies alongside glottalization, where the key to
cueing vowel onset is discontinuity, most commonly marked by a
dip in energy and/or f0 and/or creak temporally dissociated from
its expected location.
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