- 1 - An acoustic comparison between stressed and unstressed vowels in Standard Austrian German and Standard German German C AROLIN S CHMID S YLVIA M OOSMÜLLER Abstract In the present study we compare the acoustic realizations of stressed and unstressed vowels in disyllabic words in nucleus position in Standard Austrian German (SAG) and Standard German German (SGG). Results show that there are significant differences in the degree of reduction of the unstressed vowel. In SGG, the unstressed vowels are reduced to a higher degree than in SAG. SAG unstressed vowels preserve a full vowel quality [ɛ]. Other acoustic cues analyzed in the present study (f0, duration and intensity) showed less significant differences between the two language varieties. However, SGG speakers tend to make use of intensity to cue stress, whereas SAG speakers prefer to cue stress by duration. Moreover, we could find a different distribution of f0-patterns. SAG speakers prefer to have lower f0-values on the stressed vowel than on the following unstressed vowel, whereas the reverse pattern can be observed in SGG, where speakers produce higher f0-values on the stressed than on the unstressed vowel. Additionally, we could observe gender-specific preferences in the deployment of acoustic parameters. Female speakers differentiate stressed and unstressed syllables to a higher degree by duration and intensity than male speakers. INTRODUCTION This study aims at investigating the phonetic realization of the stressed and unstressed vow- els in disyllabic words in Standard Austrian German (SAG) and Standard German German (SGG), also with respect to gender- and, in the case of SAG, age-related aspects. Previous re- search has shown that in intonation languages as German, word stress is realized as a combina- tion of diverse acoustic parameters, primarily f0, intensity, and duration (for example in Beck- man 1986 and in Dogil 1991). In previous studies, intensity and duration have been found to be the most reliable correlates of word stress, whereas pitch seemed to play a minor role (Jessen et al. 1995, Sluijter 1995). In their study on segmental anchoring in German, Atterer and Ladd (2004) describe that Southern German speakers show significant later f0-peak-alignments than Northern German speakers. While there are some studies on German word stress, SAG word stress has not been investigated so far. Moosmüller and Brandstätter (in press) found that lan- guage use in the younger generation of SAG speakers seems to be more influenced by SGG than the language use of older SAG speakers. Consequently, in order to reveal a potential sound change, we took both older and younger SAG speakers into account and compared them to younger SGG speakers. In the current investigation, we will analyze the stressed and unstressed vowels in disyllabic words and examine to what extent they differ regarding the phonetic pa- rameters f0 (mean-values and timing of the f0-maximum within the nominal phrase), intensity, duration, and formant frequency values. METHODS MATERIALS Eight younger (<30 years) and eight older (>45 years) speakers of SAG as well as eight younger speakers of SGG (four female and four male speakers in each group) were asked to read a list of sentences. 1 Additional data of SGG speakers was collected by the first author. The SAG 1 The corpus of SAG speakers was collected within the project ”Vowel tensity in Standard Austrian and Standard German”, funded by the FWF, no. I 536-G20.