Nasals and Nasalisation in Speech Production with Special Emphasis on Methodology and Osaka Japanese

Sammanfattning: Nasal speech sounds occur in most of the languages of the world. Two goals concerning nasalisation in speech were pursued in the studies presented in this volume. One deals with the development and testing of a method for recording nasal vibration with an accelerometer microphone attached to the outer part of the nose, and analysing the signal with the help of a wide band spectrogram. The other aim was the investigation of speech production strategies which are used to characterise the mora nasal in Osaka Japanese and to distinguish it from the non-moraic nasal. The use of a lightweight accelerometer microphone and the interpretation of its signal with the help of spectral analysis was considered a practical method for gathering information about nasality in speech in a field work situation. Fibreoptic recordings of the velopharyngeal port confirmed that formant structure in a wide band spectrogram of the accelerometer signal differs according to the presence or absence of oral-nasal coupling. There are different speech production strategies for distinguishing the mora nasal from the non-moraic nasal in Osaka Japanese. These strategies include variation in duration, but also a variation in vowel quality, based on other aspects than velar opening. Anticipatory velar lowering procedures did not prove to account for a distinction between the two nasal categories. Classical analyses, claiming that the mora nasal in intervocalic position has to be a nasal vowel can be rejected for Osaka Japanese, since a variant with oral closure occurs. Its use, however, depends on the speaker’s age and on the quality of the post-nasal vowel.