“Problematic phonemes” and German /ɛ:/: An acoustic analysis

Abstract

The decision to include or exclude phonemes in the description of a language is not always straightforward; presentations of the phoneme inventory of Modern Standard German (MSG) often include a discussion of why /ɛ:/ is problematic as a phoneme. This study describes the acoustic realization of /ɛ:/ in comparison to /e:/ in spoken German, specifically South Westphalian. 39 native German speakers produced /ɛ:/ and /e:/ in hVt non-word frames and vowel productions were measured for: (1) first and second formants from the steady state of the vowel, (2) duration, and (3) fundamental frequency (f0). Measurements were analyzed with a logistic regression model using the glm package in R. The model showed that while the main effects of F2, duration, and pitch were not significant, F1 was; speakers reliably produced /ɛ:/ lower in the vowel space than /e:/, but not fronter. This preliminary investigation into the acoustic realizations of /ɛ:/ and /e:/ through the lens of the debate on whether these two sounds truly are phonetically and phonemically contrastive is a first step toward truly understanding these two sounds within the larger phonemic inventory of MSG. We hope that this study will reopen a discussion on this topic and help answer the question of whether /ɛ:/ really is a problematic phoneme.

L1 variation and L2 acquisition: L1 German /eː/-/ɛː/ overlap and its effect on the acquisition of L2 English /ɛ/-/æ/

“…In one study, only minor acoustic differences between the two vowels were found, which can be attributed to the fact that most speakers investigated in this study were from northern Germany ( Simpson, 1998 ). Most other acoustic analyses show differences in the pronunciation of the two vowels for speakers from different regions in Germany ( Sendlmeier and Seebode, 2006 ; Schoormann et al, 2019 ; Predeck et al, 2021 ). Results from the acoustic analysis of the corpus German Today ( Kleiner, 2011 , 2015 ) exhibit the tendency toward a merger in northern and eastern Germany as well as in Austria, while the south-west of Germany and Switzerland maintain a distinction (see Frank, in preparation ).…”