Nasal articulation in homorganic clusters in American English

Abstract

In an earlier study of the acoustic characteristics of medial /t, d/ in American English [V. W. Zue and M. Laferriere, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 66, 1039–1050 (1979)], it was found that the duration of the nasal murmur is significantly longer preceding /d/ than /t/. However, we were unable to measure the time during which the velum was open, since it is difficult to determine the onset of nasalization from the acoustic signal alone. In order to further investigate the timing relationship of articulators during the production of these homorganic clusters, data on minimal pairs such as “can't/canned” were collected from ten speakers, five male and five female. We simultaneously recorded the speech signal and a nasal signal obtained from a small accelerometer attached to the outer surface of the nose. The energy in this nasal signal is used as a measure of the degree of velum lowering. Preliminary results indicate that the onset of nasalization with respect to vowel onset for /nt/ and /nd/ clusters is approximately the same, suggesting that the voicing contrast between /t/ and /d/ is encoded in the articulatory gesture of velum lowering. [This work was supported in part by NIH Contract 5RON‐NS04322.]