On the acoustical features of vowel nasality in English and French.

Abstract

Although much is known about the linguistic function of vowel nasality, whether contrastive (as in French) or coarticulatory (as in English), and much effort has gone into identifying potential correlates for the phenomenon, this study examines these proposed features to find the optimal acoustic feature(s) for nasality measurement. To this end, a corpus of 4778 oral and nasal vowels in English and French was collected, and data for 22 features were extracted. A series of linear mixed-effects regressions highlighted three promising features with large oral-to-nasal feature differences and strong effects relative to normal oral vowel variability: A1-P0, F1's bandwidth, and spectral tilt. However, these three features, particularly A1-P0, showed considerable variation in baseline and range across speakers and vowels within each language. Moreover, although the features were consistent in direction across both languages, French speakers' productions showed markedly stronger effects, and showed evidence of spectral tilt beyond the nasal norm being used to enhance the oral-nasal contrast. These findings strongly suggest that the acoustic nature of vowel nasality is both language- and speaker-specific, and that, like vowel formants, nasality measurements require speaker normalization for across-speaker comparison, and that these acoustic properties should not be taken as constant across different languages.