The general goal of the proposed project is to answer the question how cognitive (phonological) vowel systems emerge and evolve on the basis of the physiologically given human capabilities and restrictions for articulatory speech production and auditory speech perception.

During the first application period we will perform a thorough acoustic analysis and perceptual evaluation of the vocalic contrast in German that is described as length opposition, tense-lax contrast or difference in syllable cut in different phonological theories. This will be done by comparing different standard varieties of German and analyzing ongoing changes within their vowel systems as well as by investigating the influence of prosodic factors. This procedure aims at proposing a phonetically grounded set of features suited to explicate known phonological/phonotactic restrictions of German without running into the problems of the competing actual models of their phonological description (as e.g. length neutralization in unstressed syllables, lacking quality differences in [a] vs [a:], neutralization of short e vs ä etc.).