Nasal Vowels Research Articles

Perception of Japanese moraic-nasal (/N/) sounds followed by a vowel: A comparison of Japanese native speakers and Korean learners of Japanese

This study examines the difference in the perception of the Japanese moraic-nasal (/N/) between Japanese native speakers (J) and Korean learners of Japanese (K). The intervocalic /N/ is generated not solely as nasal vowels (or vowels) but includes variations such as completely closed nasal stop [ŋ] (or [N]) in the oral cavity and the intermediates between these two. On the other hand, in the Korean language, it is necessary to clearly distinguish the place of articulatory (/m, n, ŋ/) on the nasal codas. Therefore, there is thepossibility of differences in the perception of /N/ between J and K due to differing attentiveness towards the degree of closure. This study employs the meaningful word (/goseNeN/: five thousand yen) consisting of five morae. Seven Japanese native speakers are asked to naturally pronounce /goseNeN/ to collect various sounds at the third mora of the test word. Sixty listeners (J:30, K:30) participated in the perception experiment and were instructed to identify stimuli by choosing one of two choices (/goseNeN/, /gose:eN/: encouragement). The results showed that the J judgment rate of /N/ is higher than that of the K. In conclusion, K depend on “the degree of closure” more than J in judgments of /N/.

Paradigm Structure in French Verbal Inflection

Verb inflectional morphology in French exhibits a range of complexities both in the structure of verb stems (stem-final latent consonant; vowel variation; stem-final nasal vowel ; suppletive forms ; etc.) and the organization of the inflectional system, marked for five grammatical categories: tense, aspect, mode, person and number, which in the majority of cases cannot be identified as a morphological or phonological unit. The main objective of this paper is to show that these morphosyntactic properties should be analyzed as a global affix, which operate within the same space, with no fixed order. This strategy has the advantage to 1) take into account all the verb syntactic properties, 2) avoid multiple zero suffixes, 3) avoid the use of different analyses depending on the verb class, 4) avoid non-productive and phonologically unmotivated rules of insertion of theme vowels as in [dorm-i-r-ons] dormirons, and epenthetic consonants as in [ku-d-r-ons] coudrons, 5) account for French verb inflectional system in a simple and more explanatory way than strictly segmental analyses without "motivated" processes, using massive suppletion and/or stems dependencies, where inflected verbal forms are related by arbitrary implicational associations or quantitative measures based on extensive memorization. This analysis also has the property of explaining by means of a very general principle (the Onset principle) the realization of a stem-final FC in front of the affixes 'ions' and 'iez' as in before any suffix beginning with an empty onset. The verb inflectional paradigmatic structures is captured within Construction Morphology (CxM) as stated in Booij, 2010.

Para além do fonológico: uma live ousada, política e esperançosa

Esta é uma resenha da conferência Fonologia: conquistas e desafios, proferida, no Abralin ao Vivo – Linguistics on-line, por Thaïs Cristófaro Silva, cuja fala foi marcada por seu posicionamento crítico acerca da atual conjuntura política do Brasil e do papel da comunidade científica no desenvolvimento de mecanismos voltados ao combate às desigualdades sociais. Ela destacou a interação entre a Fonética e a Fonologia e chamou a atenção para os três principais avanços da Fonética: o IPA, os avanços experimentais com diferentes tecnologias e a hipótese da motricidade cognitiva. Quanto à Fonologia, Cristófaro Silva (2020) abordou os seguintes fenômenos fonológicos do Português Brasileiro: a nasalização de vogais, a palatalização das oclusivas alveolares e o apagamento do [i] átono. Por fim, reconheceu os desafios a serem enfrentados pelas áreas em pauta, como integrar as diversas ciências cognitivas, elaborar novas terminologias, ampliar o conhecimento sobre o Português Brasileiro, valorizar o plurilinguismo e socializar o conhecimento.

Reflexões acerca da Fonologia: conquistas e desafios

A conferência apresentada por Thaïs Cristófaro Silva durante o evento Abralin Ao Vivo, foca em colaborar com alunos e interessados que desejam ingressar na área da fonologia, ou àqueles sem elementos decisivos em meio a diversidade de estudos que a priori não parecem claros. A autora desconstrói a visão ortodoxa sobre o IPA, julgando-o apenas como uma forma de representação e aponta diferentes problemas em consequência disso. Apresenta também pesquisas emergentes na área da fonética e fonologia que foram pouco exploradas, analisando fenômenos como a nasalização de vogais (e de consoantes) em finais de sílabas, palatização de oclusivas alveolares e o “apagamento” do [i] átono. E ainda, debate sobre as atuais conquistas e desafios da fonologia.

Prosodic structurally conditioned variation of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Mandarin Chinese: Its language specificity and cross-linguistic generalizability.

This study compares prosodic structural effects on nasal (N) duration and coarticulatory vowel (V) nasalization in NV (Nasal-Vowel) and CVN (Consonant-Vowel-Nasal) sequences in Mandarin Chinese with those found in English and Korean. Focus-induced prominence effects show cross-linguistically applicable coarticulatory resistance that enhances the vowel's phonological features. Boundary effects on the initial NV reduced N's nasality without having a robust effect on V-nasalization, whose direction is comparable to that in English and Korean. Boundary effects on the final CVN showed language specificity of V-nasalization, which could be partly attributable to the ongoing sound change of coda nasal lenition in Mandarin.

Modelo de teste perceptual das nasais do talian como recurso para a compreensão do português brasileiro de áreas colonizadas por descendentes de italianos

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar um modelo de teste perceptual de identificação das vogais nasais do talian como recurso para a compreensão do posicionamento dos usuários sobre os falares presentes em localidades colonizadas por descendentes de italianos. Com o uso do software TP, dez informantes foram submetidos aos testes de percepção, avaliando estímulos com características do talian ou não marcados. Os resultados mostraram uma avaliação negativa aos estímulos com características do talian, pronúncia estigmatizada na localidade, enquanto que as formas não marcadas receberam boas avaliações.

Interpretation of Grammatical Category of Gender by Fernão de Oliveira

The present research featured the definition of grammatical gender category as it was coined by Fernão’s de Oliveira (1507–1581), a prominent Portuguese linguist that wrote the first Grammar of the Portuguese Language (1536), where he outlaid the main principles of gender classification. The research was based on F. de Oliveira’s works, namely The Grammar of the Portuguese Language, The Art of Sea Warfare, The Voyage of Fernão de Magalhães, and The Book of Shipbuilding. The linguistic data were selected from the above-mentioned works based on linguistic criteria by the method of continuous sampling. The article also describes various gender definition methods, e.g. morphonology, morphology, anaphora, syntax, secondary morphologization, words of one flexion, and vocalic inflexion (alternation of open and closed, pure and nasal vowels). The analysis of Oliveira’s speculations on grammatical gender revealed that the Portuguese grammarian failed to cover the issues of Singularia / Pluralia tantum, grammatical doublets, toponyms, epicenes, possessive pronouns, and participles.

On latent nasals in Samogo

Languages in the Samogo group display a phenomenon referred to as “floating” or “latent” nasals. Though belonging to the end of a word (either synchronically or diachronically) in coda position, latent nasals more often appear as mutations or modifications to either the initial consonant of the following morpheme or the preceding vowel. This paper draws together extant descriptive data on Samogo nasals and considers them in the broader typology of consonant and vowel nasality in Mande. Finally, the question of phonological representation vs. phonetic realization is considered with preliminary acoustic data from Seenku [sos]; the weak surface realization of the nasal raises questions about an analysis in which it is floating and suggests that recent developments in Gradient Symbolic Representation (Smolensky & Goldrick 2016) may be applicable to the data.

A phonetic-phonological study of vowel height and nasal coarticulation in French

ABSTRACTThe majority of previous studies on nasal coarticulation in French find an inversely proportionate relationship between vowel opening and nasality, such that high vowels are the most nasalized, sometimes exceeding 50% nasality. However, it has been unclear whether this is a mechanical or controlled property of French, given the typically short duration of high vowels in natural speech, as well as the aerodynamic and acoustic factors rendering them more susceptible to spontaneous nasalization. This study uses nasometric data to quantify progressive and regressive nasalization in 20 Northern Metropolitan French speakers as a function of vowel height. Furthermore, the relationship between degree of nasal coupling and overall vowel duration serves as a proxy for distinguishing mechanical from controlled nasalization, in the spirit of Solé (1992, 2007). This study finds evidence that high vowel nasalization in French is mechanical in pre-nasal position, but controlled in post-nasal position. Meanwhile, nasalization of mid and low vowels is blocked in pre-nasal position but, at most, mechanical in post-nasal position. In consequence, French appears to block nasalization in otherwise lexically impossible positions (*ṼN), while passively allowing, though not actively requiring, nasalizing in positions where conflation is possible (both NṼ and NV being permitted in the lexicon).

Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition.

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues' respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English-French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.

Perceptual Compensation of Vowel Nasality in Brazilian Portuguese

This study explores the nature of the oral-nasal vowel contrast in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). While vowel nasality is a salient property in the language, scholars differ on whether this property forms the basis of a phonological contrast. The presence of a consonant-like nasal resonance at the right edge of the heavily nasalized vowels (i.e., nasal appendix) leads to an analysis that nasal vowels may be product of a contextual nasalization rule (e.g., Camara Jr 1970, 1971), thus coarticulatory in nature. While most of the literature explores the issue from the perspective of production, the present study analyzes how BP listeners perceive nasal vowels in comparison to oral counterparts. If vowel nasality is coarticulatory, speakers should perceive it as they would other coarticulation; namely, they would perceptually compensate for vowel nasality, attributing the nasality to the nasal consonant element and hearing the vowel as essentially oral (Beddor & Krakow 1999). If the nasality is phonemic, however, it should not induce compensation. A forced-choice comparison task was presented to a group of 43 BP listeners, who had to compare nasality in vowels of paired stimuli with and without the appendix. Results show that participants did not perceptually compensate for vowel nasality. The substance of the contrast lies in the combination of vowel quality changes associated with nasality and the presence of a nasal appendix.

O fenômeno de nasalização em línguas Tupí-Guaraní

Tupí-Guaraní, tronco Tupí. Para averiguação do processo de nasalidade em línguas Tupí-Guaraní utiliza-se como pressuposto teórico principal a abordagem tipológica de Walker (1998), para verificar e compreender, a partir de uma hierarquia tipológica de harmonia nasal, segmentos que podem ser gatilhos ou alvos do espalhamento nasal. O estudo também utiliza as considerações de Ohala (1993) e Cohn (1990, 1993) para examinar o processo de nasalização como efeito fonético ou fonológico. A abordagem tipológica permitiu observar o comportamento de consoantes e vogais em relação à nasalidade, possibilitando sua classificação em termos de papéis que desempenham, sejam como gatilhos, alvos, bloqueadores ou transparentes. Além disso, verifica-se também a direcionalidade da nasalização que é predominantemente à esquerda (regressiva). Os resultados mostram que, na família Tupí-Guaraní, há o predomínio de vogais nasais como engatilhadoras, seguidas de consoantes nasais, ou ambas. Os alvos são predominantemente vogais, glides e líquidas; já as obstruintes surdas, em geral, comportam-se como bloqueadoras, mas há línguas em que elas são transparentes ao processo. O domínio da nasalidade nessas línguas é preeminentemente de dois tipos: Local, quando é consoante nasal (N) e a longa distância quando é vogal nasal (Ṽ).

An Optimality Analysis of the Phonology of French Loanwords as Manifested in the Eastern Part of Algeria

The present study sheds lights on the French loanwords which are integrated in the Algerian Spoken Arabic (ASA), particularly the dialect spoken in the Eastern part. It identifies the phonological processes used to adapt them within an Optimality Theory (OT) framework. A thorough scrutiny of the data indicated that the French loanwords underwent a number of adaptations to fit into the phonological system of the Algerian Arabic. Moreover, the results revealed that this nativization process involves a number of phonological processes, namely unpacking of nasal vowels, nasal place assimilation, vowel deletion, front vowel raising, voicing, devoicing and stopping, in addition to lateral assimilation. The application of optimality framework as to explicate the adaptations of French loanwords has shown that they emanate from a steady conflict between the faithfulness constraints, which condition the preservation of original input forms, and the markedness constraints describing the Algerian Arabic marked phonological system.

Vowel nasalisation in Scottish Gaelic: No evidence for incomplete neutralisation in initial mutation

The existence of incomplete neutralisation in connection with processes like final devoicing is well-known, but little work exists on typologically more uncommon morphological processes such as Celtic initial mutation. This paper reviews the small existing literature on incomplete neutralisation in initial mutation, showing that no convincing evidence has been found so far, and presents a new nasal airflow study on four speakers of Scottish Gaelic that adds to these negative results.Radical initial /p/ and /m/ in Scottish Gaelic are neutralised to [v] under the lenition mutation. Vowels following radical initial /m/ in Scottish Gaelic may display either categorical phonological nasalisation or gradient phonetic nasalisation. Nasal airflow in items with radical initial /p/ and /m/ is measured in order to determine whether the degree of vowel nasalisation after [v] in lenited forms is sensitive to the identity of the corresponding radical consonant. LME model comparison finds that only categorical phonological nasalisation, and not gradient phonetic nasalisation, may be subject to morphological conditioning. This is at odds with widespread existing findings for processes such as final devoicing, where the gradient phonetic properties of neutralised segments display sensitivity to paradigmatic effects.The absence of incomplete neutralisation in initial mutation is consistent with recent proposals that restrict the types of morphophonological processes that may bring about incomplete neutralisation to highly transparent, phonetically natural processes involving conflict between word-specific morphological pressures and language-wide phonotactic constraints. These findings can inform us about the structure of the mental lexicon and the derivation of morphologically complex forms.

Concreteness in General Phonology: Evidence from French by Bernard Tranel

Reviewed by: Concreteness in General Phonology: Evidence from French by Bernard Tranel Amanda Dalola Tranel, Bernard. Concreteness in General Phonology: Evidence from French. UP of California, 2018. ISBN 978-0-52030-398-0. Pp. 338. Tranel's book challenges several widespread theories in French phonology and morphology from within the generative framework. Focusing on the status of nasal vowels, [Ø]~[C] alternations, the status of final schwas and the treatment of h-aspiréinitial words, this research argues methodically against a purely phonological analysis driven by economy and distant underlying and surface forms, in favor of one driven by psychological plausibility which takes into consideration relevant grammatical and lexical information. The text proceeds across three main sections—one focusing each on nasal vowels, final consonants, and protective schwa/h-aspiré words. Within each [End Page 189] section, a repeating structure propels the narrative forward: discussion first underlines the main issues in each phenomenon and summarizes the claims of previous treatments, before offering a critical review—always through the presentation of additional data which introduce complications to previous assumptions—and an alternative account able to reconcile all forms. It is in this way that we are presented with sizeable evidence to support the three groundbreaking ideas of the text: a) nasal vowels have not historically been phonologically derivable from/VN/sequences and should, therefore, be viewed as lexical in nature; b) the postulation of final schwas is unnecessary from a structural standpoint because they have no phonetic reflexes and are not naturally learnable; c) h-aspiré words are most elegantly analyzed by means of rule features, instead of the consideration of syllable boundaries or abstract lexical initial consonants. The text's comprehensive approach will appeal cross-generationally to armchair and lab phonologists alike, while the extensive example sets will delight Francophones, dictation enthusiasts, and everyone in between. The stand-alone nature of the three main parts makes the book easily digestible in chapters or as separate case studies, and the thorough treatment of previous theoretical accounts makes it optimal training ground for undergraduate and graduate students making their first foray into French phonology. Experienced linguists will also appreciate the author's appeal to plausibility based on psychological reality, a cutting-edge concept in theoretical phonology back in the early 1980s, but one that went on to become mainstream in the field in the 1990s and 2000s via the extension of Exemplar Theory. Poised to become/remain required reading for all those with interests in the French language's idiosyncratic and oftentimes complicated sound behavior, this edgy and timeless title more than retains its shine. Amanda Dalola University of South Carolina Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

A study of contextual vowel nasalization in standard peninsular Spanish

Since Navarro Tomás (1918) it is well known in Spanish phonetics that vowels between nasals become nasalized and that vowels followed by a nasal in syllable coda position might undergo a certain degree of nasalization, even if Spanish does not have nasal vowels from the phonological point of view. This study aims to explore this phenomenon through the use of a Nasometer by examining several nasal-vowel contexts (NV, VN, and NVN sequences, and with post-vocalic nasals in tautosyllabic or heterosyllabic sequences with reference to the preceding vowel), the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables containing the target vowel, and three speaking rate conditions (slow, normal, and fast). The utterances produced by three speakers of standard peninsular Spanish are analyzed. Results of the percentage of nasality and nasalance indicate that the variables under examination are statistically significant in the process of vowel nasalization, though to a varying extent. A closer look at the different syllable positions in the nasal-vowel relationship addresses the issue of anticipatory vs. carryover coarticulation effects on vowel nasalization.

Functional Substitution of a Nasal Vowel with Another Nasal Vowel in the Spoken Language of French

Functional Substitution of a Nasal Vowel with Another Nasal Vowel in the Spoken Language of French

Nasal Vowel Deletion in Spoken French

Nasal Vowel Deletion in Spoken French

전남방언 비모음화의 지리적 분포

전남방언 비모음화의 지리적 분포

An articulatory study of the alveolar versus retroflex contrast in pre- and post-stress position in Arrernte

This study presents articulometry and palatography data for Arrernte, a language of Central Australia. It examines the contrast between the apical consonants – alveolar versus retroflex – according to lexical stress. Stop, nasal and lateral consonants are treated separately. Results show that the most prototypical retroflex articulation – where the tongue tip is retracted for post-alveolar closure and eventually released at a more anterior location – occurs after a stressed vowel. By contrast, a prototypical alveolar articulation – with closure and release at the same (anterior) region along the palate – is more likely to occur before a stressed vowel. In addition, it is shown that the contrast between alveolars and retroflexes varies by manner of articulation, being clearest for the nasal manner. It is suggested that the low jaw position which is an inherent property of nasal articulations facilitates retraction of the tongue tip for retroflexion, and that nasalization of adjacent vowels may motivate an exaggeration of the alveolar-retroflex contrast. For laterals, however, the alveolar~retroflex contrast is not so clear, and it is suggested that the articulatory requirements for lateral airflow may compromise full retraction of the tongue tip. Typological implications of these results are discussed, as is the possibility that CV versus VC (i.e. alveolar versus retroflex) cues to place of articulation are best encoded within a stressed vowel.