Listeners rated the nasality of synthesized vowels using two psychophysical scaling methods (equal-appearing interval scaling and direct magnitude estimation). A curvilinear relationship between equal-appearing interval ratings and direct magnitude estimations of nasality indicated that nasality is a prothetic rather than metathetic dimension. It also was shown that the use of direct magnitude ...

This paper reports the results of a phonetic experiment investigating Korean 'denasalization', specifically, on the amount of nasality as a function of different prosodic contexts. The variation in nasal energy of onset nasal consonants of 5 subjects, from regions where the tendency of ‘denasalization’ is reported to be strong (Kyunggi-do: 3 subjects) and weak (Kyungsang-do: 2 subjects) were ex...

Nasality is a very important characteristic of several languages, especially European Portuguese. This paper addresses the challenge of nasality detection in EMG-based speech interfaces. By combining EMG data with real time imaging information, we explore the existence of useful information on the EMG data about the velum movement. Results indicate that is possible to “detect” zones of nasality...

We improve upon measures relating feature vector distributions to speaker recognition (SR) performances for SR performance prediction and arbitrary data selection. In particular, we examine the means and variances of 11 features pertaining to nasality (resulting in 22 measures), computing them on feature vectors of phones to determine which measures give good SR performance prediction of phones...

This study explores the relationship between identification, degree of nasality and vowel quality in oral, nasal and nasalized vowels in Brazilian Portuguese. Despite common belief that the language possesses contrastive nasal vowels, literature examination shows that nasal vowels may be followed by a nasal resonance, while nasalized vowels must be followed by a nasal consonant. It is argued th...

INTRODUCTION Perceptual evaluation is considered the gold standard to evaluate speech nasality. Several procedures are used to collect and analyze perceptual data, which makes it susceptible to errors. Therefore, there has been an increasing desire to find methods that can improve the assessment. OBJECTIVE To describe and compare the results of speech nasality obtained by assessments of live ...

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 heterosyll...

Velum movement signals generated from real-time magnetic resonance imaging videos of thirty-five German speakers were used to investigate the physiological conditions that might promote sound change involving development contrastive vowel nasality. The results suggest that, in comparison when a nasal consonant precedes voiced obstruent, velum gesture associated with preceding voiceless obstruen...

Phonological neighborhood density (ND) conditions variation in a number of acoustic phonetic properties of words. For example, previous research has shown greater hyperarticulation and greater nasal coarticulation in high-ND English words than in low-ND words. Here, we investigate the effects of ND on vowel hyperarticulation and vowel nasality (coarticulatory and contrastive) in French. Acousti...