German [u] vs [ʊ] : checking automatic labelling using various formant measures
Résumé
It is well known that humans vary in their production of speech. In this preliminary study, we want to focus on the production of the German back vowels [u] and [ʊ] in a large speech corpus. The grapheme in German may be uttered as [u] or [ʊ] depending on the following graphemes within the embedding morpheme. However, these predictions do not always account for personal preferences of the speakers i.e. Zusammenhang (context) has the following canonical pronunciation [tsuˈzamənhaŋ] nevertheless the word might be produced [tsʊˈzamənhaŋ] by some speakers or in some situations. Our study focuses on these alternations. We assumed that the vowels are potentially produced differently from their canonical label. In the following, we will first present our speech resource, followed by the acoustic measures and results.