In the description of German phonology, two distinct phonetic symbols are currently recommended for the transcription of the vowels [a] (a central low vowel, phonemically /a/) and [ɐ] (phonemically /əʁ/) in word-final, unstressed positions. The present study examines whether differences between these two vowels exist in production and perception of Standard German speakers from the north of Germany. In Experiment 1, six speakers produced a series of minimal pairs that were embedded in meaningful sentences and varied with respect to their accentuation and position within a prosodic phrase. In Experiment 2, the minimal pairs produced by the six speakers of the first experiment were extracted from their respective contexts and tested with 44 native German listeners in a forced-choice identification task. Perceptual results showed a better-than-chance performance for one male speaker of the corpus only. Phonetic analyses also confirmed that only this male speaker produced subtle, but consistent F2/F3 differences between [a] and [ɐ] while the contrast was completely neutralised in the rest of the corpus. We discuss the role of prosody in vowel neutralisation with a specific focus on unstressed vowels and make suggestions for phonetic and phonological accounts of Standard German.

在德语音韵学的描述中，目前推荐使用两个不同的音标来转录元音 [a]（中央低元音，音位 /a/）和 [ɐ]（音位 /əʁ/）在词尾，不重读职位。本研究检验了这两个元音之间的差异是否存在于来自德国北部的标准德语使用者的生产和感知中。在实验 1 中，六位说话者产生了一系列最小的配对，这些配对嵌入到有意义的句子中，并根据它们在韵律短语中的重音和位置而变化。在实验 2 中，由第一个实验的 6 位说话者产生的最小配对是从他们各自的上下文中提取的，并在强制选择识别任务中与 44 位德国本土听众进行测试。感知结果显示，只有一名男性说话者的语料库表现优于机会表现。语音分析还证实，只有这位男性说话者在 [a] 和 [ɐ] 之间产生了微妙但一致的 F2/F3 差异，而语料库的其余部分则完全抵消了这种对比。我们讨论韵律在元音中和中的作用，并特别关注非重读元音，并为标准德语的语音和音韵解释提出建议。