Prediction of Velum Movement from Phonological Specifications

Abstract

Abstract The vertical movement of a sample point of the velum surface in sentences uttered by 2 speakers of English has been investigated. The temporal patterns of velum movement were approximated with a series of rules. Our findings suggest (1) that the feature [ ± nasal] alone fails to explain velum height movement patterns; (2) that there are no target values for the velum for vowels (at least in the material under investigation), (3) that prosodic or configurational factors such as intrasyllabic position and stress patterns strongly influence velum height, the speed of velum movement, and the timing of velum gestures, and (4) that the strategies used by the 2 speakers are different with respect to control of movement velocity. We propose a suprasegmental feature [ ± strong] to account for observed movement patterns, including timing relations between velum raising and lowering gestures and articulatory gestures of consonantal articulators such as the lips and the tongue tip.