Aerodynamic and acoustic evidence for the articulations of complex nasal consonants Didier Demolin, Katharina Haude, Luciana Storto To cite this version: Didier Demolin, Katharina Haude, Luciana Storto. Aerodynamic and acoustic evidence for the articu- lations of complex nasal consonants. Revue PAROLE, Université de Mons-Hainaut, 2006, pp.177-205. halshs-00692079 HAL Id: halshs-00692079 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00692079 Submitted on 3 May 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Aerodynamic and acoustic evidence for the articulation of complex nasal consonants Didier Demolin*#, Katharina Haude° and Luciana Storto* Universidade de São Paulo*, Universitat Köln° & Université libre de Bruxelles# 1. Introduction Indigenous languages contribute in an essential way to understand variation in speech production and perception and to identify the constraints that act on natural languages. These constraints play a crucial role to make, to test or to revise hypotheses made in phonology. The paper examines data from Karitana, a Tupi language of Brasil, from Movima, an isolated language from the Bolivian Amazon, and from Rwanda, a Bantu language from Africa. These languages show rather uncommon data. Karitiana has pre and post oralized consonants, e.g. [bmb], as allophones of plain nasals. Movima has voiceless nasally released glottalized plosives [p /m] and [t /n]. Rwanda has a very complex set of prenasalized consonants e.g. [mbg, mvg, ndgw, nzgw, n Zgw, Ngw, m 8hn 8, n8hN8w, nskw, n Skw, N8hw]. These data are crucial to discuss issues on phonological patterning and variation and also to test the articulatory control hypothesis formulated by Kingston and Diehl (1994). The hypothesis, to be valid, crucially depends on data and on experimental observations, made in as many languages as possible or at least on a set of crucial examples. This hypothesis differs from others about the control of articulations both in the degree and kind of control it is thought that speakers regularly exercise, and in the perceptual rationale that is offered for their articulatory control. This hypothesis also differs in kind from other studies of articulatory control in thoroughly integrating articulatory, acoustics, and perceptual evidence into a complete model of the speaker’s and listener’s phonetic knowledge. The model of that knowledge is then incorporated into a larger model of the phonetics-phonology interface. The objectives of this paper are to make an experimental study of the variation in the production of complex nasal consonants of these languages; to show that aerodynamic measurements provide strong evidence for the timing of articulatory movements; to discuss the articulatory control hypothesis and to determine whether these consonants are complex nasals or make a complex onset in the syllable structure of the languages where they are observed. 2. Tupi and Jê languages Several languages from South America such as Karitiana (Storto & Demolin Submitted ms), Kaingang (Wiesemann 1972, Wetzels 1995, D’Angelis 1999, D’Angelis and Reis Silva 1999, Salanova 2001) and Maxacali (Callow 1962, Burgess and Ham 1968 and Salanova 2001) show a quite rare process affecting nasal consonants. They can be pre or/and post oralized when preceded or/and followed by oral vowels. This phenomenon, occurring also in other Jê languages spoken in Brazil, such as Apinayé, has rarely been described. From observations based on experimental data in Karitiana and acoustic data in some other languages, Storto & Demolin (submitted ms) hypothesized that the pre- or/and post-oralized nasal allophones (i.e. pre- and post-oralized (medionasals) nasals, pre-oralized, post- oralized 1, post-stopped-nasal and even fully oral) of these languages are controlled to produce the correct contrasts between segments. (See Table 1 for a sample of the data). The Karitiana data suggest that articulatory covariation is perceptually motivated and the objects of speech perception are auditory rather than articulatory. Pre and post oralized Post oralized /kina/ [ki.dnda] /ose nda/) [o.se .nda]) ‘thing’ ‘waistline’ Pre oralized Oral /ena /) [e.dna ]) /neso/ [de.so] ‘pregnant’ ‘mountain’ Table1. Karitiana data, from Storto & Demolin (submitted ms), showing pre- and post-oralized nasals, pre-oralized, post-oralized, post-stopped and oral allophones of the alveolar nasal. The complete set of allophones of the bilabial nasal /m/ is presented in table 2. Note that the same set exists at the alveolar and velar place of articulations, see Storto (1999) and Storto and Demolin (submitted ms) for a full description. 1 The term post-oralized is used instead of pre-nasalized because it refers to the pattern of allophones of the language rather than to the specific sound that can be also be observed in languages like Rwanda where it is called a prenasalized stop. It is obvious that phonetically both sounds have similar characteristics but for the sake of coherence we use post-oralized when we discuss issues related to Karitiana or to the other South American languages that have the same pattern of allophones. [m |] in environment v_#) [bmb] in environment v_v [bm |] in environment v_# [bm] in environment v_v ) [mb] in environments v_v) & #_v [m b] in environments #_v ) & v _v) ) [b] in environment #_v ) Table 2. Set of allophones for the alveolar nasal /n/ in Karitiana from Storto & Demolin (submitted ms). As table 2 shows, there is an allophone that presents an orally released burst at the release of the nasal when it is followed by a nasal vowel. Such segments are rare and have been identified before in Zhongshan and Taishan, two Chinese dialects, (Chan 1987) and in Achenese and Rejang, two Austronesian languages, (Durie 1985) and (Coady and McGinn (1982). In terms of their distribution inside the syllable, it must be mentioned that the most complex allophones bmb, dnd and g Ng, that we call medionasals, are limited to onset position. Other allophones that can only occur in the onset are the fully oral b, d, g, and the the post-oralized mb, nd, Ng. Furthermore, for most speakers, the medionasal allophone may be realized, alternatively, as post- oralized or fully oral. This variation in the pronunciation of the complex medionasal allophones can be regarded as a simplification process available to speakers inside the phonological system. It respects the syllabic restrictions of each allophone and the environmental restrictions that disallow contact between nasal consonants and oral vowels. As a consequence, when the post-oralized variant is used, the preceding oral vowel is nasalized. In order to understand how these complex segments are produced, acoustic and aerodynamic measurements were made. 2.1 Material and Method Five male subjects participated in the experiments. The words used for the present experiments are shown in table 3. Acoustic data were recorded in two sessions: the first time separately from the aerodynamic measurements, the second time with these measurements. In each recording session, subjects were asked to repeat a word containing the relevant data three times, once in isolation and then three times in a small carrier sentence: ‘Karitiana haadna pip X nakaat Y’ (where Y is the gloss of X in Portuguese). This sentence can be translated as: “In Karitiana X is Y”. The aerodynamic data consist of pharyngeal pressure, nasal and oral airflow measurements. Oral airflow measurements were taken with a small flexible silicon mask placed against the mouth. Nasal airflow was measured with a nasal mask set around the nose of the subjects. Pharyngeal pressure was recorded with a small flexible plastic tube (ID 2mm) inserted through the nasal cavity into the oro-pharynx for one subject. One session involved the recording of acoustic and all aerodynamic parameters simultaneously and another session recorded acoustics and only oral and nasal airflow. In both cases the microphone was placed next to the mask used to record oral airflow. As most subjects did not tolerate the tube used to make pharyngeal pressure measurements, they were only made for labial consonants with these subjects. This was done by asking the subjects to hold a plastic tube (ID 5mm) sideways between the lips. [apibmbik] to pierce [m ba)m|] roasted [kidnda] thing [a)mbo] to climb [sopagNgˆÔ|] eyebrows [e.dna)] pregnant [neso] mountain [ose)nda] side Table 3. Set of words processed for this paper. 2.2 Results 2.2.1 Pre- and post-oralized consonants Figure 1 shows a spectrogram and the audio waveform of the word kidnda ‘thing’, showing the pre- and post-oralized consonant [dnd]. The oral parts that precede and follow the nasal part of the complex consonant have a duration of 59 and 58 ms (see Storto and Demolin submitted ms, for more details). k i d n d a Figure 1. spectrogram and audio waveform of the word kidnda ‘thing’ in Karitiana. 2.2.2 Post-stopped and post-oralized nasals Acoustic and aerodynamic measurements for the post-stopped and post-oralized nasals are presented in Figure 2 to 5. Figures 2 and 3 show the acoustic and aerodynamic realizations of a post-stopped nasal. Figure 2 show that post- stopped nasals can be characterized as nasals that have a burst. Indeed, there is a strong burst at the time of the nasal release, with a very sharp increase in amplitude which is more abrupt than what is usually observed in the transition from a simple nasal to a following vowel. Figure 3 shows that pressure and nasal airflow increase simultaneously during the initial (post-stopped) bilabial nasal.