 |
14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
 |
|
14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
|
In most of studies on nasal vowel production, the nasal tract area at the uvula is used. The ratio between the nasal and the oral tract areas is also proposed. The aim of this paper is to determine which velar variable is more relevant of acoustic changes in nasal vowel transfer functions. It can be considered that each value of a velar variable corresponds to a probability distribution in the acoustic space. Samples of transfer functions representative of this probability distribution are generated by an articulatory model and the statistical Friedman-Rafsky test gives an objective criterion to the approximate notion of “separation” of two multivariate samples. Results show that when the nasal area increases, the sensibility of acoustic transfer functions to nasal area variations decreases and the area ratio becomes a more reliable parameter of acoustics changes in transfer functions.
Bibliographic reference. Rossato, Solange / Feng, Gang (1999): "Nasal vowel transfer functions: a statistical comparison between the nasal area and the area ratio", In ICPhS-14, 2101-2104.