Vowels adjacent to nasal consonants (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/ in English) tend to be nasalized. The effect of velopharyngeal opening on vowel nasalization has been studied by Feng et al. (1996) and Pruthi et al. (2007) with a transmission line model of the vocal tract based on MRI data of the area function. In order to find out the effect of articulatory placement on acoustic properties of nasalized vowels, the current study simulated the transfer function of coarticulated vowels in different nasal‐vowel utterances. The results revealed different acoustic characteristics of the same vowel in various nasal contexts, which demonstrated the effect of articulatory placement on vowel nasalization and suggested the possibility for oral articulation to compensate for spectral changes caused by failure of velopharyngeal closure among hypernasal patients. The articulatory parameters for compensatory articulation were optimized by minimizing the spectral differences (first four formants) between the compensated nasalized vowe...