A fiberscopic analysis of nasal vowels in Brazilian Portuguese
Résumé
This paper examines velar movements during the production of the ‘fully' nasal vowels /i, u/ in Brazilian portuguese (BP). Velum movements were measured for a female Brazilian speaker using fiberscopic video-recording synchronized with acoustic recording. The nasal vowel (Vn) was placed in initial, medial and final positions in nonwords with the following structure: /VnCoVo/, /CoVnCoVo/, and /CoVoCoVn/. The oral vowel Vo was /a, i, u/ and the oral consonant Co= /p, b, f/. Our results confirm that (i) an acoustic nasal ‘tail' N is clearly observed in 85% of Vn productions, (ii) when present, N is about half as long as the previous part of the vowel, and (iii) when Vn is in medial or final position, the maximum lowering of the velum is free to occur either before the nasal tail or during it, leading to much variability.
Domaines
Linguistique
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