Akzent auf die Standardsprachen: Regionale Spuren in

Durch ihren fremdsprachlichen Akzent gibt eine Sprecherin ihre Herkunft, ihre Muttersprache preis. So werden die meisten Deutschschweizer beim Sprechen einer Fremdsprache als solche erkannt. Kann aber aufgrund dieses "Deutschschweizer" Akzents auch erkannt werden, aus welchem Dialektgebiet ein Sprecher stammt? Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt eine empirische Studie zur Perzeption dialektaler Akzente vor. Er beschäftigt sich mit dialektalen Akzenten im Standarddeutschen und im Französischen und zeigt mit quantitativen Methoden auf, dass dialektal bedingte Akzentunterschiede von native speakers durchaus wahrgenommen und lokalisiert werden können. Darüber hinaus und als Basis für die Auswertung des empirischen Teils leistet die vorliegende Arbeit eine Beschreibung und Kategorisierung der dialektalen Lautlandschaft der Schweiz sowie einen Ansatz zur Beschreibung der Aussprache des Französischen durch Schweizer Dialektsprecher

Akzent auf die Standardsprachen: Regionale Spuren in "Français fédéral" und "Schweizerhochdeutsch"

Durch ihren fremdsprachlichen Akzent gibt eine Sprecherin ihre Herkunft, ihre Muttersprache preis. So werden die meisten Deutschschweizer beim Sprechen einer Fremdsprache als solche erkannt. Kann aber aufgrund dieses "Deutschschweizer" Akzents auch erkannt werden, aus welchem Dialektgebiet ein Sprecher stammt? Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt eine empirische Studie zur Perzeption dialektaler Akzente vor. Er beschäftigt sich mit dialektalen Akzenten im Standarddeutschen und im Französischen und zeigt mit quantitativen Methoden auf, dass dialektal bedingte Akzentunterschiede von native speakers durchaus wahrgenommen und lokalisiert werden können. Darüber hinaus und als Basis für die Auswertung des empirischen Teils leistet die vorliegende Arbeit eine Beschreibung und Kategorisierung der dialektalen Lautlandschaft der Schweiz sowie einen Ansatz zur Beschreibung der Aussprache des Französischen durch Schweizer Dialektsprecher

Big Data for analyses of small-scale regional variation:A case study on sound change in Swiss German

In this case study we examine sound change of Altoberdeutsch in Swiss German dialects. We used contemporary dialect data from nearly 60,000 speakers – collected with the smartphone app Dialäkt Äpp – and compared it to historical Atlas data from the 1950s. Results revealed hierarchical and contra-hierarchical diffusion patterns for some dialectal variants, while other variants remained virtually unchanged over the course of seven decades. We further report change in apparent time, with older speakers using traditional variants more frequently than younger speakers. Using this case study as a model, future work using the Dialäkt Äpp corpus will reveal patterns of feature diffusion and dialect leveling on a larger scale

Rhythmic variability in Swiss German dialects

Speech rhythm can be measured acoustically in terms of durational characteristics of consonantal and vocalic intervals. The present paper investigated how acoustically measurable rhythm varies across dialects of Swiss German. Rhythmic measurements (%V, ∆C, ∆V, varcoC, varcoV, rPVI-C, nPVI- C, nPVI-V) were carried out on four sentences of six speakers from eight Swiss dialects. Results indicate that there are significant differences across the dialects in some rhythm measures but not in others and that dialects can be grouped according to rhythmic characteristics

Areale Variation von /r/-Realisierungen in schweizerdeutschen Dialekten.: Eine quantitative Untersuchung von Crowdsourcing-Daten

The present study deals with the areal variation of /r/-realisations in the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland. In particular, we provide a quantitative survey of recordings collected through crowdsourcing, i. e. by means of the smartphone application Dialäkt Äpp (Leemann/Kolly 2013). Each of the 2851 recordings of the word trinke (‘to drink’) was auditorily coded by at least two of the four authors. The resulting maps show a neat areal distribution of the realisations of /r/, with alveolar variants in most of the central Midlands and in the Alpine regions. Uvular variants, on the other hand, seem to prevail in the northeastern and northwestern parts of German-speaking Switzerland. Comparing our data with traditional dialectological sources, we find evidence for the hypothesis that the alveolar realisation of /r/ has been extensively replaced by uvular variants in large parts of the northeast; apparently, a similar sound change is now in progress in the rural areas around Basel

Regional variation of /r/ in dialects of Swiss German

German-speaking Europe is known to feature substantial regional variation in the articulation of /r/. According to historical atlases, this is particularly true for the most southwestern fringe of the region, i.e. German-speaking Switzerland. Large-scale, multilocality studies that show an updated picture of regional variation in this region are lacking, however. To this end, we coded /r/s of almost 3,000 speakers from 438 localities on a predominantly auditory basis, using data crowdsourced through a smartphone app. We report substantial regional variation, with uvular articulations especially dominant in the Northwest and the Northeast and alveolar – particularly tapped – articulations prevalent in the Midlands. We further provide exemplary evidence of an urban ([ʁ]) vs. rural stratification ([ɾ]) in the Northwest. This contribution further discusses (a) issues related to the coding of /r/, given the volatile articulatory and acoustic properties of /r/s and (b) the benefits and pitfalls of the crowdsourcing methodology applied more generally

Areale Variation von /r/-Realisierungen in schweizerdeutschen Dialekten. Eine quantitative Untersuchung von Crowdsourcing-Daten

The present study deals with the areal variation of /r/-realisations in the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland. In particular, we provide a quantitative survey of recordings collected through crowdsourcing, i. e. by means of the smartphone application Dialäkt Äpp (Leemann/Kolly 2013). Each of the 2851 recordings of the word trinke (‘to drink’) was auditorily coded by at least two of the four authors. The resulting maps show a neat areal distribution of the realisations of /r/, with alveolar variants in most of the central Midlands and in the Alpine regions. Uvular variants, on the other hand, seem to prevail in the northeastern and northwestern parts of German-speaking Switzerland. Comparing our data with traditional dialectological sources, we find evidence for the hypothesis that the alveolar realisation of /r/ has been extensively replaced by uvular variants in large parts of the northeast; apparently, a similar sound change is now in progress in the rural areas around Basel

Listeners use temporal information to identify French- and English-accented speech

Which acoustic cues can be used by listeners to identify speakers’ linguistic origins in foreign-accented speech? We investigated accent identification performance in signal-manipulated speech, where (a) Swiss German listeners heard native German speech to which we transplanted segment durations of French-accented German and English-accented German, and (b) Swiss German listeners heard 6-band noise-vocoded French-accented and English-accented German speech to which we transplanted native German segment durations. Therefore, the foreign accent cues in the stimuli consisted of only temporal information (in a) and only strongly degraded spectral information (in b). Findings suggest that listeners were able to identify the linguistic origin of French and English speakers in their foreign-accented German speech based on temporal features alone, as well as based on strongly degraded spectral features alone. When comparing these results to previous research, we found an additive trend of temporal and spectral cues: identification performance tended to be higher when both cues were present in the signal. Acoustic measures of temporal variability could not easily explain the perceptual results. However, listeners were drawn towards some of the native German segmental cues in condition (a), which biased responses towards ‘French’ when stimuli featured uvular /r/s and towards ‘English’ when they contained vocalized /r/s or lacked /r/

Speaker identification based on speech rhythm: the case of bilinguals

Voices are highly individual. The present study investigated how temporal characteristics of speech can contribute to speaker individuality for the same speaker speaking in different languages. By now there is a large body of evidence showing that measures based on temporal characteristics of consonantal and vocalic interval durations show drastic within language variability that is to a high degree a result of between speaker variability ([1], [2], [4]). Here we present results from an experiment on L2 and bilingual Italian/German speakers. Our assumption was that if speaker idiosyncratic rhythmic characteristics exist, then they should be present across utterances from different languages produced by the same speaker