The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

Abstract

Abstract The study tests a model of sound change based on how prosodic weakening affects shortening in polysyllabic words. Twenty-nine L1-German speakers produced minimal pairs differing in vowel tensity in both monosyllables /zakt, zaːkt/ and disyllables /zaktə, zaːktə/. The target words were produced in accented and deaccented contexts. The duration ratio between the vowel and the following /kt/ cluster was less for lax than tense vowels and less for disyllables than monosyllables. Under deaccentuation, there was an approximation of tense and lax vowels towards each other but no influence due to the mono- vs. disyllabic difference. On the other hand, Gaussian /a/ vs. /aː/ classifications of these data showed a lesser influence due to the syllable count in deaccented words. Compatibly, when the same speakers as listeners classified synthetic sackt-sagt and sackte-sagte continua, they were shown to compensate for the syllable count differences, but to a lesser extent in a deaccented context. Deaccentuation may therefore provide the conditions for sound change to take place by which /aː/ shortens in polysyllabic words; it may do so because the association between coarticulation and the source that gives rise to it is hidden to a greater extent than in accented contexts.