The aerodynamics of vowel nasality and nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese
نویسنده
چکیده
Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is thought to possess contrastive nasal vowels that are different from contextually nasalized vowels in its phonological system. Aerodynamic data (nasal and oral airflow) of 11 native speakers show that interspeaker variability is important in this language with regard to the nasal airflow ratio of tautosyllabic nasal vowels (TNVs; campo [kɐ̃ pʊ] ‘field’) and heterosyllabic nasalized vowels (HNVs; cama [kamɐ] or [kãmɐ] ‘bed’). This shows that TNVs are not thoroughly differentiated from HNVs in production throughout the whole duration of the vowels, and speaker-specific variability is important, thus suggesting that vowel nasality has not reached a fully contrastive status in this language. Stage of assimilation of nasality on the vowel in the evolution of the phonological system is suggested as the explanation for the observed differences between HNV and TNV and the apparently ambiguous status of vowel nasality in BP.
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