Nasal Spreading as Defective Gestural Deactivation

Nasal Spreading as Defective Gestural Deactivation

Nasal spreading (also called nasal vowel-consonant harmony) is a process by which a nasal segment in a word triggers nasalization of its surrounding segments. This paper proposes a reanalysis of this phenomenon using gestures as the units of phonological representation in order to more accurately capture its crosslinguistic typological patterns. Nasal spreading proceeds unboundedly, potentially...

Ultrasound Study of Gestural Timing in Mandarin Vowel-Nasal Production

The present study uses ultrasound in combination with acoustic analysis to examine how a tongue gesture is timed in relation to acoustic syllable duration in Mandarin vowel-nasal production. The results show that gestural timing is relevant to both tongue and syllable positions; for example, anterior gestures such as the tongue tip rising tend to occur closer to syllable peripheries than open o...

Yaka Nasal Harmony: Spreading or Segmental Correspondence?

I argue that this kind of nasal harmony comes about through a correspondence relation between Cs in a word rather than resulting from feature spreading. This proposal will be important in explaining the characteristics in (1) and also the neutrality of ‘prenasal’ NC complexes in the language. From a broader perspective, this approach has the potential to extend to other segmental harmonies that...

Morphological Consonant Mutation as Gestural Affixation

Holds as Gestural Correlates to Empt

Holds are defined as an active configured gestural state where no intended (hand) motion is perceived. We analyzed the audio and video from a cartoon story telling from memory, in order to determine the extent to which gestural holds overlap with speech phenomena such as empty and filled pauses. Data from two female participants are analyzed: an Italian and an American English-speaker, each usi...