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

Observations of the Velopharyngeal Closure Mechanism in Horizontal and Lateral Directions from Fiberscopic Data

Angélique Amelot (1), Lise Crevier-Buchman (1), Shinji Maeda (2)

(1) Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie-CNRS, France
(2) ENST-CNRS, France

The present study is concerned by the spatio-temporal coordination between the movements of the lateral pharyngeal walls (LPW) and the movements of the velum. There are two objectives: first, to investigate velum and LPW movements, and second to determinate if there is a correlation between these movements in the production of the velopharyngeal mechanisms in speech. It was found that for our two subjects, there was a close correlation between velum and LPW movements. It was also discovered that the movements for opening the velopharyngeal path for a nasal vowel was influenced by the identity of the preceding oral vowel, independently from the intervening consonant, and that there was vowel-to-vowel assimilation for what concerns the studied movements.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Amelot, Angélique / Crevier-Buchman, Lise / Maeda, Shinji (2003): "Observations of the velopharyngeal closure mechanism in horizontal and lateral directions from fiberscopic data", In ICPhS-15, 3021-3024.