Perceptual compensation in nasal and nasalized vowels in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

Listeners of a language can factor out effects of coarticulation in the signal, consistent with the language’s phonological patterns. Such perceptual compensation should not occur for phonetic features that are inherent to a segment, not effects of coarticulation. Vowel nasality is an interesting feature in this case, because it can be coarticulatory or inherent depending on the language. In Brazilian Portuguese (BP), it can be both. Contrastive nasal vowels may be followed by a brief nasal resonance (nasal appendix), while coarticulatory nasalized vowels must be followed by a nasal consonant. This study explores whether or not BP listeners perceptually compensate for vowel nasality in the perception of both phonemic nasal and coarticulatory nasalized vowels in BP, examining. If BP listeners process nasal vowels as phonemes, they should not attribute nasality in the vowel to coarticulation effects in any context, except nasal consonant. Randomized stimuli pairs containing oral, nasal and nasalized vowels in three different contexts (zero, nasal appendix, nasal consonant) were presented to BP listeners who had to judge which vowel was more nasal. Preliminary results demonstrate that BP listeners do not perceptually compensate for vowel nasality in any context, be it nasal appendix or nasal consonant.