Phonetic Implementation of Nasality in Taiwanese (and French): Aerodynamic Case Studies

This paper aims at systematically investigating the aerodynamics of nasalization in Taiwanese, a language that has a nasality contrast in its vowels but are subject to stricter restrictions on nasality distribution than French. Our results show that i) the onset consonantal effects on nasal anticipatory coarticulation are subtly different between the two languages; in particular, voiced stops avoid nasal contexts in Taiwanese, ii) in onset positions, aspirated stops and fricatives induce more nasal coarticulation, iii) coda [n] triggers the least anticipatory vowel nasalization in both languages, iv) the production of nasal vowels are generally the same and vowel height is positively correlated with nasalization in both languages, v) that French has more nasal airflow volume than Taiwanese does, but no significant difference could be found as far as nasal airflow duration is concerned. Taken together, our results confirm that phonological patterning does have a bearing on phonetic implementation.