Pronunciation variation in read and conversational austrian german

Barbara Schuppler (1) , Martine Adda-Decker (2) , Juan Andrés Morales Cordovilla (3)

1 TU Graz - Graz University of Technology [Graz]
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
3 MULTISPEECH - Speech Modeling for Facilitating Oral-Based Communication

This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of pronunciation variation in conversational Austrian German. Whereas for the varieties of German spoken in Germany, conversational speech has been given noticeable attention in the fields of linguistics and automatic speech recognition, for conversational Austrian there is a lack in speech resources and tools as well as linguistic and phonetic studies. Based on the recently collected GRASS corpus, we provide (methods for the creation of) a pronunciation dictionary and (tools for the creation of) broad phonetic transcriptions for Austrian German. Subsequently, we present a comparative analysis of the occurrence of phonological and reduction rules in read and conversational speech. We find that whereas some rules are specific for the Austrian Standard variant and thus occur in both speech styles (e.g., the realization of /z/ as [s]), other rules are specific for conversational speech (e.g., the realization of /a:/ as [o:]. Overall, our results show that less words are produced with the citation form for conversational Austrian German (37.8% ) than for other languages of the same style (e.g., Dutch conversations: 56%).

Mots clés: Pronunciation; Variations; austrian german

Domaines: Linguistique

Barbara Schuppler, Martine Adda-Decker, Juan Andrés Morales Cordovilla. Pronunciation variation in read and conversational austrian german. 15th Annual Conference of the Inter- national Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2014) , Sep 2014, Singapour, Singapore. pp.1453-1457. ⟨halshs-01424944⟩