Feb 5, 2008:

The Acoustic- and Visual-Phonetic Basis of Place of Articulation in Excrescent Nasals

Laurel MacKenzie, Department of Linguistics

One common historical development in languages with distinctively nasalized vowels is the excrescence of coda velar nasals in place of nasalized vowels. For example, the dialect of French spoken in the southwestern part of France (Midi French) is characterized by words ending in the velar nasal where Parisian French has nasalized vowels and no final nasal consonant. More generally, there is a cross-linguistic tendency for the unmarked place of articulation of coda nasals to be velar. In four experiments, we explored the acoustic and visual basis of excrescent nasal velarity.