Nasal consonants in syllabic coda position in Japanese assimilate to the place of articulation of a following consonant. The resulting forms may be perceived as different realizations of a single underlying unit, and indeed the kana orthographies represent them with a single character. In the present study, Japanese listeners' response time to detect nasal consonants was measured. Nasals in cod...

One common historical development in languages with distinctively nasalized vowels is the excrescence of coda velar nasals in place of nasalized vowels. For example, the dialect of French spoken in the southwestern part of France (Midi French) is characterized by words ending in the velar nasal [N] where Parisian French has nasalized vowels and no final nasal consonant ([savO) ]~[savON] "soap")...

With the Nasometer, this paper studies the nasality contrast of liquid initials and the intrinsic nasality of seven cardinal vowels in Beijing Mandarin. The results show that the nasality contrast degree of initial consonants is high. The intrinsic nasality of vowels is closely related to the position of the tongue. The lower and more front the tongue is, the greater the degree of nasalization;...

This paper investigates the effect of vowel quality on the perception of coda nasals in Southern Min. The perceptual confusion experiment revealed that /m/ is the most confusable coda nasal, followed by /ŋ/ and then /n/. The high front vowel /i/ resulted in more misidentification of following coda nasals than mid vowel /ə/ and low vowel /a/. Within the same vowel context, higher formant frequen...

The relative perceptual confusability of the coda nasals /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ was investigated in Southern Min and Mandarin for insight into the nasal mergers that have happened in the history of the Chinese languages. Coda /m/ was the most confusable of the nasals, mirroring the historical pattern in which the bilabial was the first coda nasal to be lost. In both Southern Min and Mandarin, the al...

Phonologically prestopped nasals occur primarily in central and southern Australian languages. Phonetically prestopped nasals on the other hand, occur in a large number of Australian languages and are not isolated to one particular region. Phonetically prestopped nasals have been analysed as a preservation of spectral characteristics at vowel-sonorant boundaries in languages which have a compar...

Vowel transition duration is often claimed to be one of the important cues to place of articulation in nasals. Nasal murmur also differs in duration depending on place of articulation. The duration of nasal murmur and vowel transitions in different VNC and VN sequences were measured in the Kunwinjku variety of Bininj Gun-wok. Bilabial and velar nasals tend to be longer than alveolars and retrof...

This paper is an investigation of the temporal properties of the nasals and vowel nasalization in Cantonese by analyzing synchronized nasal and oral airflows. The nasal airflow volume for the vowels in both oral and nasal contexts and for the syllable-final nasals Z,l+ ,m+ ,M\ were also obtained. Results show that (i) the vowel duration in the (C)VN syllables is negatively correlated with the d...

This study investigates the perception of the German coda nasal contrast /n/-/m/-/ŋ/ by Japanese learners of German compared to German native speakers. The phonological distribution of coda nasals differs with/without word boundaries in the two languages. Word final coda before a pause in Japanese is neutralized to /ɴ/ but the place feature remains in German. Assimilation of coda nasals before ...