An Acoustic Corpus Contemplating Regional Variation for Studies of European Portuguese Nasals

Portuguese is one of the two standard Romance varieties having nasal vowels as independent phonemes. These are complex sounds that have a dynamic nature and present several problems for a complete description. In this paper we present a new corpus especially recorded to allow studies of European Portuguese nasal vowels. The main purpose of these studies is the improvement of knowledge about these sounds so that it can be applied to language teaching, speech therapy materials and the articulatory speech synthesizer that is being developed at the University of Aveiro. The corpus described is a valuable resource for such studies due to the regional and contextual coverage and the simultaneous availability of speech and EGG signal. Details about corpus definition, recording, annotation and availability are given.