Internal gestural coordination for derived long nasals

Abstract

Nasal consonants have been studied mainly by investigating acoustic nasal energy or the oral gesture's constriction, while less attention has been paid to how velic and oral components in nasals temporally interrelate. Given that nasals essentially require specific timing between oral and velum gestures—that is, oral closure must occur when the velum is sufficiently low—it is important to understand the regularity of this coordination. By examining the relative timing of oral and velum gestures in nasals of Seoul Korean, this real-time MRI study aims to illuminate the gestural organization of various nasal structures. Target stimuli include onset nasals (/#n/), coda nasals (/n#t/ & /n#p/), and juncture geminate nasals (both concatenated /n#n/ and assimilated /t#n/). Findings show that concatenated and assimilated geminates crucially differ in their gestural coordination and their variability. Concatenated geminates and coda nasals show similar oral-velum timing relations, while some assimilated geminates show an onset-like coordination. Furthermore, while both geminates show more extended overlap between oral and velum gestures than onset nasals, assimilated geminates exhibit greater interspeaker variability. This suggests that the internal coordination for assimilated nasal geminates is less rigidly (or stably) organized, exhibiting characteristics of both singleton onset nasals and geminate nasals. [Work supported by NIH.]