The effects of prosodic boundaries on nasality in Taiwan Min

Abstract

This study explores the effects of prosodic boundaries on nasality at intonational phrase, word, and syllable boundaries. The subjects were recorded saying phrases that contained a syllable-final nasal consonant followed by a syllable-initial stop. The timing, duration, and magnitude of the nasal airflows measured were used to determine the extent of nasality across boundaries. Nasal amplitudes were found to vary in a speaker-dependent manner among boundary types. However, the patterns of nasal contours and temporal aspects of the airflow parameters consistently varied with boundary type across all the speakers. In general, the duration of nasal airflow and nasal plateau were the longest at the intonational phrase boundary, followed by word boundary and then syllable boundary. In addition to the hierarchical influence of boundary strength, there were unique phonetic markings associated with individual boundaries. In particular, two nasal rises interrupted by nasal inhalation occurred only across an intonation phrase boundary. Also, unexpectedly, a word boundary was marked by the longest postboundary vowel, whereas a syllable boundary was marked with the shortest nasal duration. The results here support the hierarchical effect of boundary on both domain-edge strengthening and cross-boundary coarticulation.