title: Anticipatory and carry-over nasal coarticulation in the speech of children and adults.
abstract: Producing (n) requires a lingual constriction to be formed and the velopharyngeal port (VPP) to be opened. This study examined interarticulator timing in the speech of adults and children aged 5 and 10 years. A new acoustic method was developed to determine the time at which VPP opening began during vowels spoken in the context of (d-n), and VPP closing reached completion in vowels spoken in the context of (n-d). Adults and children alike nasalized most of the vowels in the (d-n) context. This suggested that the children's speech was not more "segmental" than adults'. It suggested, further, that nasalizing vowels in a (d-n) context is a natural speech process that need not be learned by young children. The children, like the adults, nasalized most of the vowels spoken in the context of (n-d). The lack of significant between-group differences, taken together with several other findings of the study, is consistent with the view that the temporal domain of carry-over nasal coarticulation is determined largely by the time needed to close the VPP (i.e., by inertial properties of the speech production mechanism).
authors.affiliation: University of Alabama at Birmingham.
authors.forename: J E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Flege
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000403:Airway Resistance; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010160:Palate, Soft / Q000502:physiology; D010614:Pharynx / Q000502:physiology; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014833:Voice Quality