ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06
4aSC23. Correlating movement and acoustic measures of nasalization.
Sharon Y. Manuel
Res. Lab. of Electron., Rm. 36-511, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139
Rena A. Krakow
Temple Univ., Philadelphia, PA 19122
Haskins Labs., New Haven, CT
Previous research using physiological instrumentation (e.g., Velotrace)
has shown systematic effects of syllable structure and stress on velum
movements [Krakow, in Phonetics and Phonology V (Nasals, Nasalization, and the
Velum, edited by Huffmann and Krakow (Academic, San Diego, 1993), pp. 87--113].
However, what has not been investigated previously is the correspondence
between the time-varying position of the velum in such data and the timing and
magnitude of acoustically detectable nasalization. A new technique developed by
Chen [ 3283 (A) (1994)] for identifying the spectral effects of nasal
coupling was found to provide a valuable way of linking the acoustic and
articulatory changes related to velopharyngeal port aperture. This paper
reports on acoustic-to-articulatory mapping using acoustic data collected in
concert with Velotrace data for a number of different utterance types,
including those with stressed versus unstressed syllables and those with
syllable-initial versus syllable-final nasals. One consistent observation is
that velum lowering can be quite extensive before acoustic effects are
observed. [Work supported in part by NIH.]