On the Role of Oral Configurations in European Portuguese Nasal Vowels

Abstract

The characterisation of nasal vowels is not only a question of studying velar aperture. Recent work shows that oropharyngeal articulatory adjustments enhance the acoustics of nasal coupling or, at least, magnify differences between oral/nasal vowel congeners. Despite preliminary studies on the oral configurations of nasal vowels, for European Portuguese, a quantitative analysis is missing, particularly one to be applied systematically to a desirably large number of speakers. The main objective of this study is to adapt and extend previous methodological advances for the analysis of MRI data to further investigate: how velar changes affect oral configurations; the changes to the articulators and constrictions when compared with oral counterparts; and the closest oral counterpart. High framerate RT-MRI images (50fps) are automatically processed to extract the vocal tract contours and the position/configuration for the different articulators. These data are processed by evolving a quantitative articulatory analysis framework, previously proposed by the authors, extended to include information regarding constrictions (degree and place) and nasal port. For this study, while the analysis of data for more speakers is ongoing, we considered a set of two EP native speakers and addressed the study of oral and nasal vowels mainly in the context of stop consonants.

Data-Driven Critical Tract Variable Determination for European Portuguese

“…Additionally, it is also relevant to note that for /ũ/ and its oral congenere, the tongue body constriction does not appear as critical as happens, for example, with /õ/. Since the velopharyngeal passage and the tongue body constriction do not appear as critical-only the orovelar passage-this may hint that any variation of velar aperture, across occurrences, is compensated with tongue adjustments to keep the oral passage [42,43]. Also of note is the absence of Vt for the more fronted vowel /ĩ/ and its oral congenere.…”

Exploring the Age Effects on European Portuguese Vowel Production: An Ultrasound Study

“…Targeting the main limitations of our previous study, the main purpose of this work is to perform a larger study of the age-related articulatory differences in EP vowels with US imaging and to investigate normalization procedures. Additionally, since there is a paucity of literature on EP oral vowels production, and the available data were collected mainly for acoustic studies [15,16,24,25] or for articulatory studies of nasal vowels [26][27][28], this study also provides valuable insights for the accurate articulatory description of EP oral vowels with US.…”

Sobre a Ditongação de Vogais Nasais em Português Europeu

“…Os sincrônicos, por sua vez, que tendem a tratar separadamente vogais e ditongos nasais, podem se concentrar no aspecto fonético ou fonológico. No que concerne aos estudos de caráter fonético, além daqueles voltados para a síntese articulatória (TEIXEIRA et al, 2001), muitos se concentram, sobretudo, nos gestos articulatórios que levam à produção das vogais nasais, que contêm duas ou três fases: um início vocálico oral, uma parte vocálica nasal e eventualmente uma terceira fase, chamada de apêndice nasal, em que a nasalização se mantém mesmo após a oclusão da consoante seguinte (SEARA, 2000;SOUSA, 1994;CUNHA et al, 2019). Do ponto de vista fonológico, por sua vez, as vogais nasais são geralmente consideradas como uma sequência bifonêmica /VN/, onde /V/ é uma vogal oral e /N/ é um segmento nasal subespecificado (BISOL; VELOSO, 2016;MATEUS;ANDRADE, 2000; ou, mais raramente, como uma sequência bifonêmica /VṼ/, em que o segundo elemento possuiria uma natureza vocálica, e não consonântica (CARVALHO, 1988;PARKINSON, 1983;PIMENTA, 2019).…”