Angelique Amelot

Nasal airflow in French Spontaneous Speech.

The goal of this paper is to compare the degree of anticipatory and carryover phenomena in the behaviour of the velum during the production of French spontaneous speech, and to compare the data with the same speech material, but read. Airflows through the nose and the mouth were taken as an indirect indication of the velum behaviour. French is a language of special interest because there is a phonological contrast between oral and nasal vowels. The results show a tendency for nasal airflow to start before the nasal and a strong propensity to spread after the nasal. No differences could be established between speaking styles (spontaneous vs. read speech) regarding nasal airflow anticipation and carryover.

A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

A nasograph and fibrescopic analysis of nasal diphtongs in Brazilian Portuguese

This paper examines velum movements during the production of front and back nasal diphtongs [ẽĩ], [ao] in Brazilian Portuguese. Velum movements were measured with a female speaker from Sao Paulo using a nasograph and fibrescopic video-recordings synchronized with acoustic recordings. The nasal diphthongs were always situated at the end of a syllable in real words containing nasal diphthongs. Contrasting oral diphthongs were also recorded for comparison. Our results show that there is a nasal appendix the end of the nasal diphthongs. This is made by a contact between the tongue dorsum and the velum. These observation are based on nasograph and fibrescopic data. They confirm previous measurements made by EMA and aerodynamic measurements with the same subject. This appendix is sometimes perceived as a short velar nasal consonant. The duration of nasal appendix is slightly different when front and back nasal diphthongs are compared. Data also show that the lowering of the Velum occurs gradually for a nasal di...

The vowel system of Nasa Yuwe

Nasa Yuwe (sometimes referred as Paes) is a language spoken in Colombia. The vowel system has four vowels timbers [i, e, a, u] that can be oral or nasal (short and long); breathy, breathy nasal; glottal, glottal nasal. This makes a total of 32 contrastive vowels. This study examines the acoustic and articulatory characteristics of each type of vowel. Data come from synchronized acoustic, EGG and fiberscopic measurements. A special focus is given to the acoustic and articulatory features of breathy and glottal vowels. The breathy character appears in the last part of the vowel. This is realized by a slightly wider opening between the vocal folds or by an aperture between the arytenoids. The glottal character of the vowels also appears at the end. The data clearly show that glottal vowels are different from a laryngalized counterpart. Spectrographic and EGG observations show irregularities towards the end glottal vowels. These are followed by a closure or a stricture made either at the glottis or in the epi...

Evaluation of a photonasography

A photonasographic (PNG) technique was tested to evaluate velopharyngeal port (VP) opening/closing during speech. This system uses a photodetector placed in the pharynx via a nostril and a fiberscope in another nostril pointing to the back wall of the nasopharynx. With this setting, the light is reflected from the walls, passes through the open port, and is sensed by the photodetector. In a pilot experiment, a native French speaker read sequences C1V1C1 V2C1V1, where C1=/n/ or /t/ and V1,2=/a/, /i/, /A/, /E/, or /O/, as /tatA ta/. The obtained PNG data compare qualitatively well with the velum position data, on the same corpus, derived from the naso‐fiberscopic video images. When NPG detects a VP opening, the fiberscope data correspondingly indicate a lowering of the velum and inversely. PNG, as well as the velum position data, show that VP is open at the onset of a nasal phoneme and is closed just after the offset of that nasal phoneme. Moreover, VP is not completely closed during the first and second ph...