Articulatory reduction in fluent speech

A pilot study on syllabic [n] in spoken Standard German

Abstract

The paper reports of an acoustic and perceptual study on reduction of the German word final syllable '-en' [@n] in contrast to single word final [n]. Three utterances of 'ein' and 'einen' were cut from the same sentence utterances of four different speakers and analysed according to their segment durations. In a perception experiment these utterances had to be identified.
Statistical analyses revealed that the perception of 'einen' is mainly dependent on the duration of the final [n] segment itself. Detailed analysis of the results however showed that there may be quite complex articulatory reorganization resulting in the perception of the so called syllabic [n].