Volume 40, Issue 2

The investigations reported on in this paper took their departure from earlier findings which showed rhythmic as well as word boundary effects on segment and syllable durations in German, with different strengths in different speakers. They also pointed to influences from F₀ contours and from coarticulation on this timing adjustment. This article is thus concerned with the interplay of rhythmic and semantic structuring of German speech, signalled by prosodic features, especially by F₀ and duration, marginally also by speech pauses. The rhythmic principle is the segment and syllable compression within the foot basic to stress-timing, modified by various coarticulatory processes, which allow faster executions of speech gestures. The semantic principle is that of information structuring, by organizing speech into information units, at a hierarchy of levels, by marking information points within them, and by establishing various degrees of cohesion within and between these information units.

Speech segment durations are widely used as cues in the phonetic interpretation of speech (during its perception). To devise a system of quantitative rules for the automatic phonetic interpretation of natural speech it is necessary to know with what reference the speech sound duration is to be compared. An experiment with a specially arranged set of stimuli has shown that durations of adjacent sounds in an utterance, namely vowels, are used as the reference for word stress perception in Russian.

This paper deals with the discussion of vowel acoustics in the correspondence between Euler and Lambert, the two most important German-speaking physicists and mathematicians in the second half of the 18th century. It seems plausible that the prize question set by the St. Petersburg Academy for 1780 goes back to the problem treated in this correspondence and that it was even suggested by Euler himself. The dissertation which Kratzenstein handed in is therefore reviewed in relation to the physical knowledge of the 18th century as it manifests itself in this correspondence. This is followed by reflections on the philosophy of science. In order to gain a complete awareness of the prerequisites of modern acoustic phonetics the historical rethinking of its development is indispensable and is thus part of present-day phonetic research.