Acoustic properties of Dutch steady-state vowels : contextual effects and a comparison with previous studies

Recent vowel corpora show that there are often clear acoustic differences between vowels produced in different phonetic contexts. We expand on a recent corpus of Northern Standard Dutch (NSD) vowels by including a variety of consonantal contexts. Our results show that there are very clear contextual effects on the spectral and temporal properties of NSD vowels. The most striking effect is the apparent 'fronting' of vowels in alveolar contexts, which has not previously been reported for Dutch. Classification with a supervised learning algorithm reveals some substantial differences between our acoustic measurements and those reported in earlier studies on NSD vowels.