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WE 2: Vowel reduction and vowel loss in German dialects: Structural coherence and cognition

From a diachronic perspective, reductions of word-final unstressed syllables from V > ə > Ø starting in Old High German period is arguably the most important morpho-phonological process shaping the word prosodic structure. The different states of final syllables as full, reduced, or omitted syllables can still be found in German dialects. The overall objective of our project is to study how different types of word-final reduced syllables are distributed in German dialects and which effects such variants of final syllables have on speech processing. Based on this, we want to gain insights into the historical development of both vowel reduction and vowel loss. For this purpose, the project consists of two parts: (i) in a geolinguistic analysis, a corpus of German dialects will be systematically scrutinized for production patterns of schwa apocope and schwa syncope and (ii) perception studies will investigate the preferences for word prosodic patterns in listeners from different dialect areas by means of event-related potential measurements. 

The main aim of the first part of the project is to identify regions which are more prone to or more robust against vowel reduction, and to pinpoint the phonological and morphological contexts in which vowel reduction takes place. The data for this approach comes from dialect grammars, dialect atlases, and from speech corpora. The analyses will be performed using techniques from the area of spatial statistics. We hypothesize that there are spatially coherent differences in vowel reduction in all major dialect areas that reflect different stages in language history. We also assume that, nevertheless, there is variation within all major dialect areas. This part of the project will thus identify which stage each German dialect or a selection of German dialects represents on the historical path V > ə > Ø (degrees of structural coherence). 

In the second part, the project will examine the perception of different degrees of reduction. This will allow to investigate whether a certain form is perceptually more or less demanding than others, irrespective of the way word endings are phonetically realized. In an ERP study, participants from dialect regions with different degrees of word final reductions (High German dialects in the Valais, the Upper Saxonian area, East Friesland) will be tested on their implicit evaluation of different noun shapes that vary according to the level of word final reduction (no reduction, reduction to schwa, and deletion). The acceptability of different forms will inform us about the cognitive role of vowel reductions or vowel loss, whether they are perceived as advantageous or disadvantageous. This, in turn, will provide synchronic data that have the potential to explain the underlying pressure for different typological developments in historical language change that started hundreds of years ago with the process of schwa apocope.