The Contextual Effects of Nasal Vowels on Velopharyngeal Opening in Quebecois French
Abstract
The extent of velopharyngeal opening (VPO) corresponds with the degree of nasalization in a given speech segment. Previous studies of French found that in contextual nasalization, carryover nasalization leads to greater VPO than anticipatory nasalization but this is based on only a few speakers and/or less direct measures of VPO. We compared the VPO of oral vowels preceding (anticipatory) or following (carryover) a phonemically nasal vowel. Using an X-ray videofluorographic database, we analyzed the sentence-level speech of 9 (5 male, 4 female) native Quebecois French speakers. We used imaging software to measure the ratio of VPO from a sagittal view of the vocal tract (0 = maximally closed; 1 = maximally open). The average VPO for anticipatory nasalization (M = 0.28, SD 0.15) was greater than that of carryover nasalization (M = 0.22, SD 0.10). A likelihood ratio test (lmerTest and ANOVA) determined that contextual nasalization has a significant effect on the VPO of the phone (p-value < 0.001) with no effect of sex or speaker. Our findings expand on previous observations regarding gradations of nasalization, rather than binary nasalization.
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