Korean domain-initial nasals have been reported to lose their nasality in Accentual Phrase-initial or higher prosodic domain-initial positions in the prosodic hierarchy. Researchers disagree about the exact nature of the phenomenon, and whether it should be called ‘nasality weakening’ instead. They also debate whether there is a proportional link between the degree of denasalisation and the rel...

In this work we present a recently acquired MRI database for European Portuguese. As a first example of possible studies, we present results on 2D and 3D analyses of European Portuguese nasals, particularly nasal vowels. This database will enable the extraction of 2D and/or 3D articulatory parameters as well as some dynamic information to include in articulatory synthesizers. It can also be use...

According to Ladefoged and Maddieson (1999), nasals are among the most common sounds in languages around the world. As the most common sounds, these three nasals are presumably among the easiest to produce and acquire. However, Mandarin speakers seem to have difficulty articulating English /n, ŋ/ codas. For example, Hansen’s (2001) study reveals that Mandarin speakers tend to produce English /ŋ...

Velum position during speech shows systematic variability within and across speakers, but has a binary phonological contrast (nasal and oral). Velum lowering is often thought to constitute an independent phonological unit, partly because of its robust prosodically-conditioned timing during nasal stops. Velum raising, on the other hand, is usually considered to be a non-phonological consequence ...

Four forced-choice identification tasks examined the recognition of words containing sounds that have undergone the process of nasal place assimilation (‘phone box’: /n/→[m]) or stop place assimilation (‘cat box’: /t/→[p]). Identification scores and response times were measured for words ending in unassimilated or assimilated coronal consonants, which were either presented in isolation or withi...

We developed a CALL (computer-aided language learning) system for teaching the pronunciation of Japanese long vowels, the mora nasal and mora obstruents to nonnative speakers of Japanese. Long vowels and short vowels are spectrally almost identical but their phone durations differ significantly. Similar conditions exist between mora nasals and non-mora nasals, and between mora and non-mora obst...

This paper reports the results from an instrumental investigation into speaker specific strategies of stop voicing, devoicing and glottalisation in German. Laryngograph recordings were taken from eight German speakers producing /p, t, k/ and /b, d, ɡ/ preceded by vowels, nasals or /l/ and followed by nasals or /l/. Four of the subjects produced glottalised stops in some phonetic environments, t...