Lit Lang Library

View Full Calendar

Linguistics Seminar Series Lecture: Sarah Johnson, PhD Candidate, Linguistics: "Spontaneous nasalization: an articulatory investigation of glottal consonants in Thai"

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Department of Linguistics
Location
Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana
Date
Apr 29, 2019   4:00 - 5:00 pm  
Speaker
Sarah Johnson, PhD Candidate, Linguistics
Cost
Free and open to the public.
Views
8
Originating Calendar
School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Calendar

Nasalization can spontaneously emerge in contexts lacking an historical etymological nasal. In Thai, low and mid-low vowels are reported to nasalize after /h/ and to a lesser degree after /ʔ/. It has been reasoned that nasalization in proximity to /h/ may occur because of coarticulatory breathiness between /h/ and adjacent vowels. Nasalization and breathiness are acoustically similar; both introduce higher energy at low frequencies and increase spectral tilt. Glottal consonants may generally facilitate nasalization because they are phonetically underspecified for velum position and may thus be produced with a lowered velum. We investigated physiological nasalization and breathiness in Thai during vowels after /h/ and /ʔ/ by measuring velopharyngeal opening (VPO) via ultra-fast MRI, nasal aerodynamics, and glottal open quotient via electroglottography. Ten speakers exhibited a complex system of nasalization during CV syllables that varied based on onset consonant. We observed three important findings: (1) All vowels after /h/ manifested more physiological nasalization than vowels after /ʔ/ and oral controls. (2) /h/ onsets were produced with greater nasal airflow than proceeding nasalized vowels, suggesting that the /h/ is the locus of nasalization that spreads. (3) Finally, vowels after /h/ were produced with a brief increase in physiological breathiness that is likely associated with coarticulation with /h/. We conclude that VPO is likely responsible for impressions of greater nasalization after /h/; elevated breathiness associated with /h/ may also play a minor role in the perception of nasality. Finally, our results suggest that while velum position is underspecified during /h/, velum position is, in fact, specified during /ʔ/. These findings have important repercussions on our understanding of velopharyngeal underspecification of glottal consonants and how the velum and the larynx interact during nasalization.

link for robots only