Acoustic vowel quality of filler particles in German

Abstract

The vowel quality of filler particles (FP) is studied for 24 speakers of German who produced 666 instances of vocalic (äh) and vocalic-nasal forms (ähm) in spontaneous dialogues. The FP vowel quality is compared to reference vowels of a word list as well as to phonologically and graphematically similarly constructed lexical syllables. Filler particles show a complete overlap with the reference vowels [÷] and [5], but overlap only partially with [E] and [@].