The effects of coarticulatory timing and lexical frequency on vowel nasalization in English: An aerodynamic study.

Abstract

Recently it has been suggested that a certain degree of variability in coarticulatory vowel nasalization is due to variation in the temporal alignment of nasal and oral gestures for N. In particular, the extent of vowel nasalization in VNC sequences is shown to be inversely related to the duration of the oral gesture for the nasal. Beddor [nasals and nasalization: the relation between segmental and coarticulatory timing, ICPhS (2007) present acoustic data which suggests this to be the case in English; in environments where nasals are shorter, such as VNC[−voice] versus VNC[+voice], anticipatory nasalization is longer. The present study examines vowel nasalization in such environments and attempts to corroborate the aforementioned acoustic findings with aerodynamic data. Additionally, other possible sources of variation in the extent of anticipatory nasalization are explored, namely, the effects of lexical frequency, which has been claimed to correlate negatively rather than positively with coarticulation [carborough (2004).]