Peter Gilles, Jörg Peters, Peter Auer und Margret Selting: Perzeptuelle Identifikation regional markierter Tonhöhenverläufe. Ergebnisse einer Pilotstudie zum Hamburgischen

The present study describes a pilot study for the identification of the Hamburg dialect on the basic of its intonational features. In an experiment to test levels of perception, the persons tested were asked to assess single test-utterances, which differed from each other only with regard to pitch, in terms of their perceived closeness to the speech of Hamburg. Using original utterances made by a regionally neutral female speaker, the test sentences were created with the help of a speech-resynthesizing process, which allowed manipulation of pitch contour alone. The investigation revealed that those utterances which showed the intonation contours characteristic of Hamburg speech were judged to be more typical of this variety than those characterized by a regionally neutral contour. The present study, therefore, supports the view that it is possible to identify regional varieties of German on the basis of intonation alone.