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Abstract:
Unstressed syllables are produced by a reduction of movement
amplitudes and durations compared to stressed syllables. In order
to investigate the effect of deaccentuation on tongue tip gesture
s in /tVt/ sequences with all 15 vowels of German we recorded
tongue tip movements of five speakers by me ans of EMMA. The
movement paths of the tongue tip sensor of stressed items were
manipulated to sim ulate kinematic parameters of unstressed items
in three different ways: truncation, rescaling and combined
truncation and rescaling. The following parameter of simulated
movements were compared to meas ured unstressed items: durations
and peak velocities of opening and closing movements, overall
dist ance during syllable, the interval between velocity peaks as
percentage of syllable duration and th e number of acceleration
peaks between velocity peaks. The results indicate that no type
of simulation can account for all parameters in all vocalic
contexts. The combined simulation resembled most clo sely the
kinematic parameters of unstressed items but could not generate
the smaller amplitudes of lax unstressed syllables, since
durational reduction of lax vowels due to deaccentuation was very
small, i.e. the spatial reduction was not proportional to the
temporal reduction for lax items.
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