Where /ar/ the /r/s in standard austrian German?

The present paper investigates the conditions under which different realizations of /R/ occur in standard Austrian German. The study is based on 509 word tokens containing the phone sequence /aR/ in coda position drawn from a corpus of read speech from seven male Austrian radio speakers. Acoustic measurements of the vowel /a/ revealed that F1, F2 and F3 are significant predictors for the realization of /R/ as either trill, fricative or as absent. Moreover, /a/ tends to be longer when /R/ is absent than when it is present. Our analysis of the linguistic conditions for the different realizations of /R/ showed that /R/ is least reduced in stressed syllables and in words read in isolation. Furthermore, we observe that the segmental context significantly affects the realization of /R/. Most importantly, we find significant effects of morphology: /R/ tends to be more reduced when it is part of a grammatical morpheme than when it is part of the stem of a word. These findings inform the further development of models of pronunciation variation for human and automatic speech recognition.

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