Nasal Vowels Research Articles

Vowel nasalization does not cue ambisyllabicity in American English nasals: Evidence from nasometrya).

Using visual spectrographic examination of vowel nasalization to diagnose the syllabic affiliation of phonologically ambisyllabic nasal consonants (e.g., gamma), Durvasula and Huang [(2017). Lang. Sci. 62, 17-36] argued that anticipatory vowel nasalization in these words patterns with word-medial codas. Using nasometry, the current study finds that anticipatory nasalization before monomorphemic and multimorphemic (scammer) ambisyllabic nasals differ from word-medial coda (gamble) and word-final nasals (scam), but not from other intervocalic nasals. Additionally, vowel nasalization is sensitive to the manner of the preceding phoneme. These findings demonstrate that quantifying anticipatory nasalization using nasometry differs from visual spectrographic criteria.

Comparing human and machine's use of coarticulatory vowel nasalization for linguistic classificationa).

Anticipatory coarticulation is a highly informative cue to upcoming linguistic information: listeners can identify that the word is ben and not bed by hearing the vowel alone. The present study compares the relative performances of human listeners and a self-supervised pre-trained speech model (wav2vec 2.0) in the use of nasal coarticulation to classify vowels. Stimuli consisted of nasalized (from CVN words) and non-nasalized (from CVCs) American English vowels produced by 60 humans and generated in 36 TTS voices. wav2vec 2.0 performance is similar to human listener performance, in aggregate. Broken down by vowel type: both wav2vec 2.0 and listeners perform higher for non-nasalized vowels produced naturally by humans. However, wav2vec 2.0 shows higher correct classification performance for nasalized vowels, than for non-nasalized vowels, for TTS voices. Speaker-level patterns reveal that listeners' use of coarticulation is highly variable across talkers. wav2vec 2.0 also shows cross-talker variability in performance. Analyses also reveal differences in the use of multiple acoustic cues in nasalized vowel classifications across listeners and the wav2vec 2.0. Findings have implications for understanding how coarticulatory variation is used in speech perception. Results also can provide insight into how neural systems learn to attend to the unique acoustic features of coarticulation.

The Role of (Re)Syllabification on Coarticulatory Nasalization: Aerodynamic Evidence from Spanish

Tautosyllabic segment sequences exhibit greater gestural overlap than heterosyllabic ones. In Spanish, it is presumed that word-final consonants followed by a word-initial vowel undergo resyllabification, and generative phonology assumes that canonical CV.CV# and derived CV.C#V onsets are structurally identical. However, recent studies have not found evidence of this structural similarity in the acoustics. The current goal is to investigate anticipatory and carryover vowel nasalization patterns in tautosyllabic, heterosyllabic, and resyllabified segment sequences in Spanish. Nine native speakers of Peninsular Spanish participated in a read-aloud task. Nasal airflow data were extracted using pressure transducers connected to a vented mask. Each participant produced forty target tokens with CV.CV# (control), CVN# (tautosyllabic), CV.NV# (heterosyllabic), and CV.N#V (resyllabification) structures. Forty timepoints were obtained from each vowel to observe airflow dynamics, resulting in a total of 25,200 datapoints analyzed. Regarding anticipatory vowel nasalization, the CVN# sequence shows an earlier onset of nasalization, while CV.NV# and CV.N#V sequences illustrate parallel patterns among them. Carryover vowel nasalization exhibited greater nasal spreading than anticipatory nasalization, and vowels in CV.NV# and CV.N#V structures showed symmetrical nasalization patterns. These results imply that syllable structure affects nasal gestural overlap and that aerodynamic characteristics of vowels are unaffected across word boundaries.

Apparent-time variation in the use of multiple cues for perception of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in California English

This study examines apparent-time variation in the use of multiple acoustic cues present on coarticulatorily nasalized vowels in California English. Eighty-nine listeners ranging in age from 18-58 (grouped into 3 apparent-time categories based on year of birth) performed lexical identifications on syllables excised from words with oral and nasal codas from six speakers who produced either minimal (n=3) or extensive (n=3) anticipatory nasal coarticulation (realized by greater vowel nasalization, F1 bandwidth, and diphthongization on vowels in CVN contexts). Results showed no differences across listeners’ identification for Extensively coarticulated vowels, as well as oral vowels by both types of speakers (all at-ceiling). Yet, performance for the Minimal Coarticulators’ nasalized vowels was lowest for the older listener group and increased over apparent-time. Perceptual cue-weighting analyses revealed that older listeners rely more on F1 bandwidth, while younger listeners rely more on acoustic nasality, as coarticulatory cues providing information about lexical identity. Thus, there is evidence for variation in apparent- time in the use of the different coarticulatory cues present on vowels. Younger listeners’ cue weighting allows them flexibility to identify lexical items given a range of coarticulatory variation across (here, younger) speakers, while older listeners’ cue weighting leads to reduced performance for talkers producing innovative phonetic forms. This study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between multidimensional acoustic features resulting from coarticulation and the perceptual re-weighting of cues that can lead to sound change over time.

Causative construction in Likpakpaanl (Konkomba)

This article is a contribution to the cross-linguistic discussion on causation. It proceeds on the note that causation is a significant notion, both cognitively and grammatically. I make a case that the Mabia (Gur) languages of West Africa are severely under-represented in the literature on causation. I then focus on causation in Likpakpaanl, an under-researched Mabia language spoken in Ghana and Togo in West Africa. I further present data from thirteen other related West African languages for comparative purposes. Broadly speaking, Likpakpaanl deploys all the traditional causation strategies- lexical, morphological, serialising and analytic. However, the use of nasals, especially vowel nasality as a causativisers is novel and uniquely places Likpakpaanl among its linguistic relatives. The Likpakpaanl analytic causative marker chà has a functional scope for both factitive and permissive causatives. In a sense, the source of the specialised analytic causative marker in Likpakpaanl diverges from the oft-cited cross-linguistic source of analytic causative markers. The Likpakpaanl biclausal causative is the balanced structure and, therefore, aligns well with the biclausal causative structure described for the West African linguistic area, contra the deraked structure of Indo-European languages. A thorough investigation of the constellation of causatives in Mabia promises new insights into causative typology.

The Position of Khatak in Pashto Dialectology

AbstractPashto is a major language of the Iranian family with multiple dialects spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In this paper, I examine the phonological inventory of the previously little known Khatak Pashto by a comparison with the well‐known Yusufzai, of the Northeast dialect of the language. I use primary data collected from Karak and Mardan districts of northwest Pakistan. In my analysis, I identify the similarities between these two varieties and the differences, based on at least eleven phonological isoglosses including the feature of vowel nasality, which split the two. I conclude by supporting the case for a distinct Central dialect area to represent the position of Khatak Pashto.

An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Nasalization in Pakistani English

An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Nasalization in Pakistani English

Nasal/Oral Vowel Perception in French-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants and Children With Typical Hearing.

The present study investigates the perception of vowel nasality in French-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs; CI group) and children with typical hearing (TH; TH group) aged 4-12 years. By investigating the vocalic nasality feature in French, the study aims to document more broadly the effects of the acoustic limitations of CI in processing segments characterized by acoustic cues that require optimal spectral resolution. The impact of various factors related to children's characteristics, such as chronological/auditory age, age of implantation, and exposure to cued speech, has been studied on performance, and the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli in perceptual tasks have also been investigated. Identification and discrimination tasks involving French nasal and oral vowels were administered to two groups of children: 13 children with CIs (CI group) and 25 children with TH (TH group) divided into three age groups (4-6 years, 7-9 years, and 10-12 years). French nasal vowels were paired with their oral phonological counterpart (phonological pairing) as well as to the closest oral vowel in terms of phonetic proximity (phonetic pairing). Post hoc acoustic analyses of the stimuli were linked to the performance in perception. The results indicate an effect of the auditory status on the performance in the two tasks, with the CI group performing at a lower level than the TH group. However, the scores of the children in the CI group are well above chance level, exceeding 80%. The most common errors in identification were substitutions between nasal vowels and phonetically close oral vowels as well as confusions between the phoneme /u/ and other oral vowels. Phonetic pairs showed lower discrimination performance in the CI group with great variability in the results. Age effects were observed only in TH children for nasal vowel identification, whereas in children with CIs, a positive impact of cued speech practice and early implantation was found. Differential links between performance and acoustic characteristics were found within our groups, suggesting that in children with CIs, selective use of certain acoustic features, presumed to be better transmitted by the implant, leads to better perceptual performance. The study's results reveal specific challenges in children with CIs when processing segments characterized by fine spectral resolution cues. However, the CI children in our study appear to effectively compensate for these difficulties by utilizing various acoustic cues assumed to be well transmitted by the implant, such as cues related to the temporal resolution of stimuli. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25328704.

Laryngeal contrast and sound change: The production and perception of plosive voicing and co-intrinsic pitch

Abstract: Inspired by Beddor 2009, this article explores whether and how trading relations between coarticulatory source and effect may serve as a precursor for sound change. It aims at extending the case of vowel nasalization examined by Beddor to the relationship between closure voicing (source) and co-intrinsic pitch (effect). Through four production and perception studies, we show that the inverse source-effect relation observed for vowel nasalization is not found in the voicing contrast of French, a true-voicing language. Instead, we propose that the phonologization of co-intrinsic pitch (a.k.a. tonogenesis) originates from spontaneous devoicing (a production bias), which subsequently triggers an upweighting of pitch (a perceptual adaptation strategy).*

Analisis Morfofonemik Dialek Lamalera

This research is entitled "Morphophonemic Analysis of Lamalera Dialect". This title was taken as research because the Lmalera dialect is the Lamaholot language and has its own identity in the form of vowel lengthening in the previous syllable. This morphophonemic work is determined on the influence of morphemes and phonemes as well as grammatical influence. The formulation of the problem in this study is how Lamalera morphophonemic which includes morpheme and phoneme effects and grammatical effects of Lamalera dialect. The purpose of this study is to find out the morphophonemic process of Lamalera dialect in the form of morpheme and phoneme effects and grammatical effects of Lamalera dialect. The method in this research uses the listening method and the chap method, while the data analysis technique in this research is descriptive. The reason the researcher uses this technique is a way used by researchers to process data which will then be descriptive in detail the results of observations of the data that has been collected. The conclusion of this study states that, nouns ending in the vowel /a/ will change to the nasal vowel /a^/ in the form of the second person singular owner. Lamalera dialect has a joint where -an changes into /a^/, there is also a morphophonemical change which is the lengthening of the vowel in the previous syllable. When due to other grammatical elements that follow the vowel changes /e^/ and /o/, the vowel changes /e^/ and /o/ in nouns. If the vowel /e"/ is preceded by another vowel, the morphophonemic changes will follow the pattern below: the final vowel /e"/ preceded by the vowel /a/ only takes a morphophonemic change to /i/.

The Effects of Orthography on the Pronunciation of Nasal Vowels by L1 Japanese Learners of L3 French: Evidence from a Longitudinal Study of Speech in Interaction

In recent decades, a vast literature has documented crosslinguistic influences on the acquisition of L2 phonology and in particular the effects of spelling on pronunciation. However, articulating these research findings in terms of taking into account the effects of L1 phonology and spelling on L2 pronunciation in language teaching remains to be examined. These studies are based on experimental cross-sectional methods and mainly focus on L2 English learning by speakers of languages with an alphabetic system. In French, there are few studies on crosslinguistic influences on the acquisition of the nasal vowels (/ɑ~/, /ↄ~/ and /ε~/) and few experimental studies that point to a possible effect of orthography on the pronunciation of these phonemes. The results of experimental studies are difficult to transpose to the language classroom because they are based on word or sentence reading and writing activities, which are quite far-removed from the conversational activities practised in the classroom in interaction with peers and the teacher. Hence, we opted here for a case study of the effect of spelling on the production of nasal vowels in interaction tasks. We conducted a longitudinal study during the first year of extensive learning of French (4 hrs 30 per week). The results of a perceptive analysis by expert listeners show that (i) learners spell nasal vowels with an <n> or <m> in 98% of the obligatory contexts; (ii) most nasal vowels are perceived as nasal vowels in speech (72%), the others being perceived as vowels followed by a nasal consonant (19, 5%) or as oral vowels (8.5%); (iii) consonantisation is stronger when the learner spontaneously produces a word than when (s)he repeats it, (iv) which decreases with time (learning effect) and varies (v) according to the consonant, /ε~/ being less consonantised than /ↄ~/ and /ɑ~/. Finaly, we propose a didactic discussion in the light of intelligibility and influence of orthography.

Once again to the problem of the chronology of the emergence and decay of Slavic nasal vowels

We show that already in the very first examples of Slavic vocabulary that has come down to us in the 6th–8th centuries. (Slavic onomastics in Byzantine sources, Slavic toponymy in Greece, Slavisms in the Romanian language) there is a fairly large layer of terms with nasal vowels. This quite convincingly suggests that the phonetic phenomenon under discussion arose in Proto-Slavic times, even before the Slavs themselves appeared on the historical arena. Analyzing the decay of nasal vowels in the East Slavic language, we show that the generally accepted argument about the disappearance of these vowels in the 10th century, based on the names of the Dnieper rapids by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (Νεασήτ and Βερούτζη), is very weak. Data from Byzantine sources, for example, the mention of the name Svyatoslav in the form Σφενδοσθλάβος/Σφενδοσθλάβον in the treatise of Leo the Deacon, describing the events of 971/972, convincingly indicate that nasality in princely anthroponymy in the 10th century. was still preserved. We show that the thesis about the disappearance of nasal vowels in Rus' in the 10th century, which has acquired the character of an imperative ideologeme in the modern linguistic environment, is incorrect both in form and in essence. The chronology of nasal vowel decay was determined by the specific vowel. Anthroponyms with small yus retained their nasality until the second — third decades of the 11th century. Using the example of the lexeme сѫбота, we demonstrate that its nasal phonetics were borrowed into the Kipchak dialects during the first contacts of the Russian princes with the Cumans in the middle of the 11th century. The term shambe / şənbə / šenbe will become the basis for designating the days of the week in Iranian and a number of Turkic languages. Nasality in the pronunciation of words with a major yus in the Old Russian language was lost only in the last decades of the 11th century.

Nasal Vowels in Solor Dialect of Lamaholot Language and Their Morpho-Syntactic Significance

The Lamaholot language spoken in East Flores and Lembata has several interesting distinctive features, compared to its neighboring languages. One of these features is nasal vowels. Nasal vowels in this language are phonemic, in that they show distinct meanings in contrasted minimal-pair words. Because of this phonemic characteristic, the nasal vowels in the dialect have significant influences on the Lamaholot linguistics. This research will examine the importance of nasal vowels in Solor dialect of Lamaholot morphologically and syntactically. Two research problems this study has tried to answer are (1) what are the morphologic and syntactic significances of the nasal vowels of Solor Dialect of Lamaholot Language, and (2) what meanings do these nasal vowels indicate when they involve in morphological processes? Apart from being an additional linguistic reference for the study of languages in eastern Indonesia in particular, and Austronesian languages at a broader level, this research also contributes to the efforts to maintain regional languages in East Nusa Tenggara. The approach to be used in this study is descriptive. The theory referred to is functional typology with the concepts of Basic Linguistic Theory based on generative structural grammar. References to the theory can be read, among others, in Payne (1997), Dixon (2010a), Comrie (1989) and Sophen (2007a, 2007b, 2007c). Data for this study was collected through recording and elicitation from the native speakers of Solor dialect. The collected corpus in the form of audio data is analyzed and stored electronically with the Praat application, and then transcribed into text form. The text data is sorted, then analyzed and stored electronically with the Toolbox application, which can later be used as additional data for the Solor – Lamaholot dialect dictionary database, which the author is currently working on. The research results show that the presence of nasal vowels in the Solor dialect of the Lamaholot language gives very significant and influential contribution to the communication and speech of speakers of this dialect. This grammatical feature is so important that its presence can give rise to different interpretations by listeners. Morphosyntactically, the nasal vowels in Solor dialect of the Lamaholot language express five functions, namely (1) to express the pronominal form of ownership; (2) to express the form of alienable ownership; (3) to express the enclitic form of third person singular possession in common nouns; (4) to state the participial function derived from the verb; and (5) to express the attributive function of adjectives in the Solor dialect of the Lamaholot language.

Vowel nasalization in Cuban Spanish. Formalization and instrumental analysis of speech samples from Havana

Vowel nasalization in Cuban Spanish. Formalization and instrumental analysis of speech samples from Havana

Назализованные гласные алтайского языка по данным назографии и спектрографии

The paper presents the examination of the vowel nasalization in the Altai language. The study involved an experiment on nasography. A native speaker of the Altai language recited a program comprising 180 lexemes in an isolated context, repeating it three times. The speech was captured by the icSpeech dualmicrophone system that allows sound from the mouth and nose to be recorded separately. The recordings were annotated using the Praat software and then analyzed with the Emu-SDMS corpus system using the R programming language. The nasality coefficient was calculated by comparing sound levels across channels. Vowels before nasal consonants exhibited a slow increase in nasality coefficient, gradually transitioning from a low to a medium level during vowel lengthening. Vowels following nasal consonants exhibited pronounced nasalization, with a heightened nasality level at the vowel onset and a consistent mid-level nasality throughout its duration. Vowels between two nasal consonants had a combination of these two types: high nasality level in the beginning, then nasality fall followed by slow growth. The average nasality coefficients for pure vowels were 6030 units, for prenasal vowels were 9860 units, for postnasal vowels were 16990 units, and for internasal vowels were 18290 units. Next, the spectra of nasalized and non-nasalized vowels were compared. The formant frequencies and levels were measured using the Praat software. The data shows a significant decrease in F1 level for nasalized vowels as opposed to non-nasalized vowels. The phenomenon can be attributed to the initial nasal antiresonance, correlating with acoustical models and typological data.

Analiza lingwistyczna pieśni polskojęzycznych ze wsi Murowana Oszmianka

The subject of the article is an analysis of the lyrics of 13 Polish songs sung in the village of Muravanaya Ashmyanka. A linguistic analysis of the transcribed lyrics of the songs based on the author’s personal recordings, conducted according to dialectological publications, and carried out on the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels, revealed numerous clear influences of the East Slavic languages. Among the many deviations from the general Polish language, and the multitude of dialectal features characteristic of the Northern Borderlands dialect, the following may be concluded: asynchronous pronunciation of nasal vowels at the final position and before fricative consonants, vowel reduction, the pronunciation of the dental consonant ł, the occurrence of the prepositional construction instead of the general Polish synthetic one, preservation of the voiced quality of the consonant w after voiceless consonants, soft pronunciation of l, change of grammatical gender, voiced pronunciation of the consonanth. The lyrics of the collected and transcribed songs are an example of valuable linguistic material fading into oblivion with the passage of time.

Gestural Timing Patterns of Nasality in Highly Proficient Spanish Learners of English: Aerodynamic Evidence.

Segment-to-segment timing overlap between Vowel-Nasal gestures in /VN/ sequences varies cross-linguistically. However, how bilinguals may adjust those timing gestures is still unanswered. Regarding timing strategies in a second language (L2), research finds that native (L1) strategies can be partially transferred to the L2, and that higher L2 proficiency promotes a more successful phonetic performance. My goal is to answer whether bilingual speakers can adjust their L1 coarticulatory settings in their L2 and to observe whether their L2 accentedness plays a role in ultimate attainment. Ten native speakers of Spanish (L1Sp) who were highly proficient L2 English speakers participated in Spanish and English read-aloud tasks. A control group of 16 L1 English speakers undertook the English experiment. Aerodynamic data were collected using pressure transducers. Each participant produced tokens with nasalized vowels in CVN# words and oral vowels in CV(CV) words. Four linguistically trained judges (two per target language) evaluated a set of pseudo-randomized sentences produced by the participants containing words with nasalized vowels and rated the speech on a 1 (heavily accented) to 9 (native-like) Likert-type scale. Measurements for onset and degree of overall nasality were obtained. Results indicate the L1Sp group can accommodate gestural timing strategies cross-linguistically as they exhibit an earlier nasality onset and increment nasality proportion in L2 English in a native-like manner. In addition, a positive correlation between greater vowel nasality degree and native-like accentedness in the L2 was found, suggesting L2 timing settings might be specified in higher spoken proficiency levels.

Use of gradient anticipatory nasal coarticulatory cues for lexical perception in French

The current study examines anticipatory nasal coarticulation in French, a language which is known to exhibit a) quality differences between phonemically oral and nasal vowels and b) relatively low amounts of nasal coarticulation in CVN contexts. In a production study, thirty native Northern Metropolitan (Parisian) French speakers produced seven sets of CṼ-CVC-CVN words (e.g., [sɛd] cède, [sɛn] scènes, [sæ̃] saint). Consistent with previous studies, results indicated quality differences between the vowels in CṼ versus CVC and CVN words, and also that acoustic nasalization in CVN contexts was relatively small; nevertheless, it was still significantly greater than in CVC contexts, and variable across speakers. In a perception study, the CV portions of the production recordings were played to fifty French listeners, who identified the corresponding word in a forced-choice task. Results showed that stimuli from CVN contexts were highly confusable with CVC items, but not with CṼ items. Most importantly, increased degree of acoustic nasalization on individual CVN stimuli significantly correlated with accuracy. We conclude that, despite the overall relative weakness of coarticulatory cues to nasality, French listeners can nevertheless employ these cues when they are stronger.

Problemy z interpretacją fonologiczną samogłosek nosowych w języku polskim

PROBLEMS WITH PHONOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF NASAL VOWELS IN POLISH The article discusses problems related to the sound realisation of the nasal sounds “ą” and “ę” as well as the differences in the phonological interpretation of those realisations. The issue has been raised many times by linguistic researchers, which proves its complexity. The article is an overview as its main goal has been to compare suggestions in terms of the nasal phonemes range, including the author’s suggestion for the phonological interpretation of the second part of the biphonemic sound production of the sounds “ą” and “ę” using phonological opposition and sound distribution.

An Airflow Analysis of Spanish and English Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization among Heritage Bilinguals

Gestural timing overlap between a vowel and subsequent nasal consonant results in the vowel being articulatorily nasalized. Research has shown that such degree of coarticulation varies cross-linguistically (e.g., English exhibits a greater gestural timing overlap than Spanish). This phenomenon has mainly been investigated in monolingual samples, and with only a small number of studies focusing on second and heritage language gestural timing patterns of nasality; the role of bilingualism in this respect is thus an open question, which is the focus of the current study. Sixteen second-generation US-born heritage bilinguals participated in this experiment. Their degree of bilingualism was assessed via the Bilingual Language Profile. They completed two separate read-aloud tasks: one in Spanish (heritage language) and one in English (second language). Simultaneous oral and nasal airflow were collected via pressure transducers from words that included phonetically oral and nasalized vowels. Results indicate that heritage bilinguals increment the degree of vocalic nasalization from Spanish to English. Nevertheless, their degree of bilingualism did not yield statistical significance in phonetic performance. The current study is the first one implementing aerodynamic methods with a heritage bilingual population and presents data for the possibility to possess two segment-to-segment timing strategies in heritage grammars.