Velum position during speech shows systematic variability within and across speakers, but has a binary phonological contrast (nasal and oral). Velum lowering is often thought to constitute an independent phonological unit, partly because of its robust prosodically-conditioned timing during nasal stops. Velum raising, on the other hand, is usually considered to be a non-phonological consequence ...

In the framework of studies on nasality, we have attempted to develop a 3-D articulatory model of velum. Sets of 25 sagittal MRI images have been collected for one French subject sustaining 46 articulations. Contours of the velum have been manually drawn from these images; a common 3-D triangular mesh has then been fitted to these contours in order to constitute 3-D representations of the velum...

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...

BACKGROUND Meningiomas of the velum interpositum in the roof of the third ventricle are rare. Knowing from which leaflet the meningioma originates and thus its relationships with the internal cerebral and Galen veins, may help in choosing the surgical approach. CASE DESCRIPTION We report the case of a 40-year-old male with a meningioma arising from the superior leaflet of the velum interposit...

Participants were asked to breath through their mouth or their nose, forcing them to adopt a particular position of their velum (up or down). While breathing in each of these positions, they categorized sounds from an /ada/ to /ana/ continuum. The position of the speech articulators, even though adopted for the purposes of breathing, altered participants’ perception of external speech sounds, s...

An original three-dimensional (3D) linear articulatory model of the velum and nasopharyngeal wall has been developed from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography images of a French subject sustaining a set of 46 articulations, covering his articulatory repertoire. The velum and nasopharyngeal wall are represented by generic surface triangular meshes fitted to the 3D contours ex...

Articulatory synthesis could become a valuable tool to investigate links between articulatory gestures and acoustic cues. This papers presents the construction of an articulatory model of the velum which is intended to complete a model already comprising other articulators. The velum contour was delineated and extracted from a thousand of X-ray images corresponding to short sentences of French....

MRI techniques have been used to describe velum opening of French vowels. Data based on 18 joined axial slices of 4 mm thickness were recorded with four subjects. Differences in velum opening are calculated from areas measured in the tract between the lowered velum and the back pharynx wall. Results show that for all subjects, the back vowel [symbol: see text] has the smallest opening, while so...

It has been shown that articulator movements during speech are adjusted along a number of spatiotemporal dimensions. For example, variations in the extent of lip, jaw, or tongue motion are associated with proportional changes in the respective articulators' peak velocity. Modifications in the timing of lip and jaw actions are apparently constrained, exhibiting relative timing covariation. Sylla...

The structure and function of the embryonic velum of two closely related species of Crepidula with different modes of development are examined. The velum of C. dilatata, a direct developer whose embryos feed on nurse eggs, does not differ substantially from the velum of C. fecunda, a species with planktotrophic larvae. Although velar ciliation develops earlier in embryos of C. dilatata, embryos...