Melanie Weirich

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena

The goal of the CRC 1412 "Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" is to answer the overarching research question "What constitutes a language user's register knowledge?". Our starting point is the observation that many situational and functional parameters-such as the relation between the interlocutors, the purpose...

Kiezdeutsch is a multiethnolectal variety of German spoken by young people from multicultural communities that exhibits lexical, syntactic, and phonetic differences from standard German. A rather salient and pervasive feature of this variety is the fronting of the standard palatal fricative /ç/ (as in ich “I”) to [ɕ] or [ʃ]. Previous perception wor...

We present results on phonetic register variation (i.e. conventionalized and socially recurring linguistic patterns of intra-individual speech behavior) in contrasting situated interactions. In this paper, we analyze intra-individual differences in local speech rate. Data was elicited with a novel method where participants talk to a video-taped int...

This paper deals with inter-and intra-speaker variation over time in adult-directed speech of first-time parents. The study investigates the potential effects of sociopsychological parameters such as parental involvement and gender identity in German and Swe-dish mothers and fathers. Picture descriptions of 71 participants were recorded at four tim...

Previous research has identified cross-linguistic differences in the relation between gender identity and acoustics. This study tests whether such differences extend to different cities in the same country (in western and eastern parts of Germany, formerly BRD and GDR, with distinct historical developments). Results show that gender role concepts v...

This study investigates acoustic and perceptual correlates of gender in prepubertal voices. 60 German speaking pupils (29 girls, 33 boys, aged 6-8 years) were recorded in first and again in second grade. A listening experiment was conducted to find out how female or male the voices are perceived to be. Stimuli of the five most female- and male-soun...

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending...

Speech carries a wealth of information about the speaker aside from any verbal message ranging from emotional state (sad, happy, bored, etc.) to illness (e.g., cold). Central features are a speaker’s gender and their sexual orientation. In part this is an inevitable product of differences in speakers’ anatomical dimensions, for example on average m...

In Berlin, the pronunciation of /ç/ as [ɕ] is associated with the multi-ethnic youth variety (Kiezdeutsch). This alternation is also known to be produced by French learners of German. While listeners form socio-cultural interpretations upon hearing language input, the associations differ depending on the listeners’ biases and stereotypes toward spe...

Purpose The study sets out to investigate inter- and intraspeaker variation in German infant-directed speech (IDS) and considers the potential impact that the factors gender, parental involvement, and speech material (read vs. spontaneous speech) may have. In addition, we analyze data from 3 time points prior to and after the birth of the child to...

While phonetic features of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been described cross-linguistically, especially in mothers, the reasons and conditions under which they are found are less clear. In this study, phonetic cues of IDS are investigated in 21 Swedish mothers and fathers including mean fundamental frequency (f0), variation in f0, formant valu...

Gender specific variation in phonetic parameters exist cross-linguistically. However , differences between languages in the size of this variation point to a socio-cultural aspect influencing these gender-specific differences. This study investigates fundamental frequency and vowel space size in 71 Swedish and German males and females , thereby com...

This study investigates a possible relationship between perceived and self-ascribed gender identity and the respective acoustic correlates in a group of young heterosexual adult speakers. For the production study, a sample of 37 German speaking subjects (20 males, 17 females) filled out a questionnaire to assess their self-ascribed masculinity/femi...

Perception experiment. (CSV)

Gender identity and acoustic measures. (CSV)

Individual differences in speech production and, more specifically, in the realization of stress contrasts have been found previously (e.g. de Jong, 1995). This study extends this line of work by investigating potential genderspecific differences in the realization of different accent conditions and more specifically in the degree of undershoot. Th...

Differences between male and female speakers have been explained in terms of biological inevitabilities but also in terms of behavioral and socially motivated factors. The aim of this study is to investigate the latter by examining gender-specific variability within the same gender. The speech of 29 German men and women-all of them expecting their...

The results of the quantification of the acoustic differences between German /ç/ and /ʃ/ in three speaker groups with varying contrast realizations are presented. Data for two speaker groups were collected in Berlin and Kiel, where the contrast is still realized. Data for a third group were collected in Berlin from speakers of Hood German—a youth-s...

It is known that speakers (and genders) express their social identity by varying in small phonetic details (Foulkes & Docherty 2006). Speakers have several speech registers they use depending on the situation, or who they are talking to (SAT, Giles & Coupland 1991, Goldinger, 1998). A first hint that a profession can influence speech patterns was f...

Purpose Mumbling as opposed to clear speech is a typical male characteristic in speech and can be the consequence of a small jaw opening. Whereas behavioral reasons have often been offered to explain sex-specific differences with respect to clear speech, the purpose of this study is to investigate a potential anatomical reason for smaller jaw openi...

We are investigating the speech of German and Swedish mothers and fathers during the first year of their first baby. Both infant-and adult-directed speech are analyzed and compared between the sexes but also between different time points during the first year. In addition, the involvement in child care is considered as a potential factor. We are no...

In this study, we are investigating the acoustic characteristics of the five voiceless German fricatives [f s ç ʃ χ] elicited in non-words from 3 speakers each of two German dialects. The northern German dialect differentiates these five fricatives whereas in the middle German region and in Berlin, /ç/ and /ʃ/ have already merged or are in the proc...

We are presenting first results on group specific variability in vowel space size, sibilant contrast and and f0 patterns. In addition, a relationship between phonetic details and socio-psychological factors is discussed.

This chapter presents three studies dealing with articulatory inter-speaker variability in German. In particular, organic sources (such as biomechanics of the tongue muscles, palatal shape and vocal tract dimensions) of idiosyncratic variation are discussed. Two studies deal with the within-pair similarity of identical (monozygotic) and non-identic...

[2] postulates that the multi-ethnolect Hood German (as spoken in Berlin, Ger) differentiates three realizations of /ç/: [ç], [ɕ] and [∫]. Earlier acoustic analyses of 1192 tokens of /ç/ from the ZASspontaneous speech database (collected from 9 adolescent speakers of the Hood German multiethnolect) [9] showed no reliable differences in curtosis, sk...

This study examines possible differences between the acoustic realization of the intersibilant contrast /s/~/ʃ/ in German and American English. A range of acoustic parameters (COG, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis and Discrete Cosine Transformation coefficients) are calculated to characterize the spectra of the two sibilants. Significant diff...

Talk presented at P&P10, Universität Konstanz

This study offers a possible physiological explanation for the observation that male speakers have repeatedly being found to exhibit less clear speech than females. We investigate one correlate of clear speech: jaw opening. In two articulatory data sets (American English, German) the jaw angle is examined as a function of sex and, additionally for...

Studies have shown that although females on average have a larger acoustic vowel space than males, they exhibit a smaller articulatory vowel space. From this it is hypothesized that sex-specific differences in undershoot might exist. Articulatory vowel space sizes and Euclidean distances between vowel positions are analyzed in nine German speakers...

Multi-ethnic youth varieties of languages have been ob-served in many urban centers of Europe. Our previous work showed that speakers of Hood German have a tendency to centralize the diphthong /ɔɪ/ in comparison to speakers of a standard Berlin variety. In this study, we are investigating the linguistic factors that influence diphthong centralizati...

This study investigates acoustic and articulatory correlates of coda /r/ in East Thuringian using Ultrasound imaging tech-nique (UTI). A selection of /r/ and /r/-less word pairs contain-ing the vowels /ɛ a ɔ ʊ/ (e.g. 'Metz-März', /mɛts-mɛrts/) of seven male speakers were recorded. Systematic differences in lingual configurations and spectral patter...

Multiethnic urban German (Hood German) as spoken by adolescents in Berlin differs in several significant ways from more standard varieties of Berlin German. It is characterized by a variety of morpho-syntactic alternations and phonetic var-iants uncommon to the regional standard spoken in Berlin. Previous quantitative corpus analyses have shown tha...

Despite various studies describing longer segment durations and slower speaking rates in females than males, there appears to be a stereotype of women speaking faster than men. To investigate the mismatch between empirical evidence and this widespread stereotype, listening experiments were conducted to test whether a relationship between perceived...

The differential categorization of identical stimuli depending on the presence of a prime is described as a perceptual divergence effect. We examined whether native listeners of the Berlin vernacular of German categorized identical acoustic stimuli differently in the explicit context of the names of two different districts of Berlin, assuming that...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to further explore the understanding of speaker-specific realizations of the /s/–/ʃ/ contrast in German in relation to individual differences in palate shape. Method Two articulatory experiments were carried out with German native speakers. In the first experiment, 4 monozygotic and 2 dizygotic twin pairs were...

The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the amount of inter-speaker variability in the articulation of monozygotic twin pairs (MZ), dizygotic twin pairs (DZ), and pairs of unrelated twins with the goal of examining in greater depth the influence of physiology on articulation. Physiological parameters are assumed to be very similar in MZ...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential relationship between speaking fundamental frequency and acoustic vowel space size, thus testing a possible perceptual source of sex-specific differences in acoustic vowel space size based on the greater inter-harmonic spacing and a poorer definition of the spectral envelope of higher pitched...

A fairly recent observation of multi-cultural urban German speech as spoken in Berlin is that the diphthongs /oy/ and /ey/ are realized more closed and fronted compared to more standard varieties of German. For this pilot study, spontaneous speech data were collected through standardized interviews from five young female speakers from two different...

A recent observation of multi-cultural urban German speech as spoken in Berlin is that the diphthong /oy/ is realized more centralized and fronted compared to the standard variety of Berlin German. For this study, spontaneous speech data was collected through standardized interviews from 11 female speakers from different neighborhoods in Berlin. Th...

"Females speak faster than males." Although several studies have proved this stereotype to be wrong [Byrd (1994)], it is still a widespread belief in many languages and within both genders. The interesting question is why. Two findings are particularly relevant regarding this stereotype: First, females reveal a greater acoustic vowel space than mal...

Young multi-ethnolectal speakers of Hamburg-German introduced an alternation of /ç/ to [∫] following a lax front vowel // [1]. We conducted perception studies exploiting this contrast in Berlin (Germany), a city with large multi-ethnic neighborhoods. This alternation is pervasive and noticeable, it is mocked and stigmatized and there is an awarenes...

The work presented in this dissertation set out to evaluate articulatory, acoustic and perceptual similarities and differences among monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. In this respect, this dissertation contributes to the discussion of the impact of NATURE versus NURTURE on the production and perception of speech in general and on inter-spe...

Die Dissertation thematisiert sprecherspezifische Variabilität bei ein- und zweieiigen Zwillingen hinsichtlich Artikulation, Akustik und Perzeption. Die zentrale Fragestellung ist, ob sprecherspezifische Charakteristika auf physiologisch-biologischen Differenzen der Sprecher beruhen (BIOLOGIE), oder sich auf gelernte, umweltabhängige Unterschiede z...

The purpose of this study is to further explore the understanding of speaker-specific realizations of the /s/-/S/ contrast in relation to individual morphological differences. In particular, we investigate the relationship between individual palate shape and the realization of the contrast in a) twins and b) a more heterogenous speaker group by mea...

Auer (2004) postulates that the multi-ethnolect Kiezdeutsch (Berlin, Germany) differentiates three realizations of ∕ɪç∕: [ɪç]; [ɪʃ]; [ɪϕ]. Acoustic analyzes of 1192 tokens of ∕ç∕ from the ZAS-spontaneous speech database (collected from nine adolescent speakers of the Kiezdeutsch multi-ethnolect as spoken in Berlin) showed no reliable differences in...

It is assumed that the rate at which speakers articulate is constrained by physiological factors such as the mass of an articulator and the distance an articulator must travel, by linguistic factors such as the utterance's phonetic complexity and by cognitive factors. We carried out an articulatory study using Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) w...

This study examines articulatory and acoustic inter-speaker variability in the production of the German vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/. Our subjects are 3 monozygotic twin pairs (2 female and 1 male pair) and 2 dizygotic female twin pairs. All of them were born, raised and are still living in Berlin and see their twin brother or sister regularly. We assum...

Watching the speaker's face under noisy auditory conditions generally increases the intelligibility of speech. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of facial hair, covering parts of the articulators, on visual speech intelligibility under noise. We hypothesized that facial hair decreases intelligibility, leads to a longer reaction tim...

If one walks through the first level of the main building at the Humboldt University in Berlin and looks at the portraits of the researchers who studied there, became professors, and in some cases won Nobel prizes, one may conclude that the most important visual signs of a famous person are being a man and having a beard. Wearing a beard has a long...

ZASPiL 52.2010 contains 8 articles.

This study is a follow-up of our previous work and investigates transitional schwas between consonant clusters as a consequence of a gestural separation due to a slow speech rate. These uncontrolled schwas are compared to similar sequences with lexically specified schwas. Articulatory and acoustic data of 6 German speakers were recorded. Preliminar...