Gender-specific differences in sibilant contrast realizations in English and German

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 differences are found between the male and female intersibilant contrast, indicating that females produce a stronger acoustic contrast between /s/ and /ʃ/ in both languages. While in the German data set a tendency for gender-specific differences in accent realizations was found, the effect did not reach significance.