Velopharyngeal opening in French: Revisiting velum configuration in nasal, oral, and rest intervals

Abstract

Velopharyngeal Opening (VPO) is associated with nasality in speech. Earlier studies on French suggested that there is a continuum of VPO: nasal vowels, nasal consonants, contextually nasalized vowels and, finally, oral segments. However, most of these studies used isolated words/syllables, very small numbers of participants, and/or indirect measures of the VPO. In this study, we tested whether the predictions from the previous studies extend to sentence-level speech with a substantially larger speech sample drawn from more participants using a more direct measurement of the VPO. Using the Université Laval X-ray videofluorography database containing speech from nine Quebecois French speakers, the VPO was measured for speech segments and rest positions. Results indicate that VPO was greatest during between-utterance intervals, followed by (in descending order) phonemically nasal segments, contextually nasalized segments, and oral segments. Contrary to previous suggestions of differences of VPO in nasal segments, no difference was found between nasal vowels and nasal consonants suggesting that such classification is not necessary (and the traditional binary [±nasal] feature still holds). Furthermore, in contrast to previous reports, anticipatory nasalization was found to have greater VPO than carryover nasalization.