Nasometric values for European Portuguese: preliminary results

Resonance is one of the most prominent characteristics of human speech. Problems affecting nasal resonance are widely reported in speech pathologies, causing severe perturbations in subjects speech intelligibility. Nasal resonance values can be obtained through different instrumental methods, however, the nasometer proved to be an indirect and objective assessment instrument which results have shown to have a high correlation with perceived nasality (Hardin et al. 1992, Hirschberg et al. 2005). Normative nasalance scores have been already determined for several languages such as English (Seaver et al. 1991), French, Spanish (Nichols 1999), Puerto Rican Spanish (Anderson 1996), Finnish (Haapanen 1991), Dutch, Flemish (van Lierde et al. 2000) and Hungarian (Hirschberg et al. 2005). Some of the studies pointed to the existence of differences among different dialects, reinforcing the need to have nasalance norms established for each sample in every language. Our research main goal was to collect normative nasalance scores for European Portuguese language, in order to make possible an easy detection of nasal resonance problems in this language, either hiponasality or hipernasality. 0. Introduction