The films in this demo use the German sound /o:/ to contrast the articulation of a sound
when spoken in isolation with its articulation in a fluently spoken sentence. The intention is
not to illustrate specific coarticulation effects systematically, but simply to give an idea of
the variation that can occur.
An interesting exercise is to try and decide simply by listening how the the articulation of
the fluently spoken utterance will differ from the isolated utterance. Even for trained ears
this is extremely difficult.
Reference Utterance
/o:/ spoken in isolation. The position of the tongue during this utterance is included as a
reference contour in the other films (white line joining the positions of the four sensors on the tongue).
For all films, movements are shown for 4 sensors on the tongue, with front to back on the tongue arranged left to right in the film.
Time is coded in colour, starting in blue, moving through to red.
Thus, points on the trajectories of the different sensors with the same colour correspond to the same time instant.
The white line above the tongue movement paths is the contour of the hard palate, roughly from upper incisors and alveolar ridge on the left to junction between hard and soft palate on the right.
Hint: Expanding the films to full-screen makes it easier to use the slider to look in detail at the movements.
Example 1. “Der tote Däne hatte sieben junge Töchter”
Complete sentence
Target word "tote"
Notes: Tongue quite a bit higher and not quite so far back as in the reference utterance.
In
this case it may possible to hear that the quality of the /o:/ shifts towards (roughly) /u:/.
Example 2. “Wieviel dünne Kissen liegen denn auf dem Sofa?”
Complete sentence
Target word "Sofa"
Notes: Back of tongue never quite as far back as in the reference utterance.
Example 3. “Der nette Schotte hat eine schwarze Socke verloren”
Complete sentence
Target word "verloren"
Notes: The /r/ after /o/ is vocalized to a low schwa; between /l/ and /n/ the back of the tongue never rises as high as in the reference utterance.
Example 4. “flogen”
Just the target word shown (extracted from a longer sentence)
Notes: Although /o:/ is a long vowel it is not possible to observe any kind of stationary “hold” phase, i.e there is continuous movement from the /l/ through to the /g/.
Example 5. “sofort”
Just the target word shown (extracted from a longer sentence)
Notes: In all the previous examples the /o/ was in a syllable with lexical stress. The present
example shows by way of contrast the very large changes that can occur in
unstressed, reduced syllables, i.e the first syllable of “sofort”.
Again, unlike the previous examples this kind of change should be easy to hear.
(Note that the ‘o’ in the second syllable is an open /O/, and so not comparable with the
other examples.)