15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Perception of Prenasalized Stops

Patrice Speeter Beddor, Chutamanee Onsuwan

University of Michigan, USA

Prenasalized stops are estimated to occur in 10-15% of the world's languages, yet there has been little investigation of their perceptual characteristics. A series of acoustic and perceptual experiments was conducted on the prenasalized stops of the Bantu language Ikalanga. The main acoustic cues differentiating prenasalized stops (^NC) from plain nasals (N) were a short post-nasal oral closure for ^NC and heavy coarticulatory vowel nasalization following N. Independent manipulation of these cues showed that Ikalanga listeners used both segmental and coarticulatory timing in identifying ^NC vs. N, although carryover coarticulatory nasalization was both a sufficient and necessary cue for the distinction. Comparable weighting of anticipatory nasalization was not found for tests of the ^NC-C distinction, although this different perceptual outcome is in keeping with Ikalanga acoustic patterns.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Beddor, Patrice Speeter / Onsuwan, Chutamanee (2003): "Perception of prenasalized stops", In ICPhS-15, 407-410.