Temporal characteristics of nasalization in children and adult speakers of American English and Korean during production of three vowel contexts

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the temporal characteristics of nasalization in relation to (1) languages, (2) vowel contexts, and (3) age groups. Two distinct acoustic energies from the mouth and nose were recorded during speech production (/pamap, pimip, pumup/) using two microphones to obtain the absolute and proportional measurements on the acoustic temporal characteristics of nasalization. Twenty-eight normal adults (14 American English and 14 Korean speakers) and 28 normal children (14 American English and 14 Korean speakers) participated in this study. In both languages, adults showed shorter duration of nasalization than children within all three vowel contexts. The high vowel context revealed longer duration of nasalization than the low vowel context in both languages. There was no significant difference of temporal characteristics of nasalization between American English and Korean. Nasalization showed different timing characteristics between children and adults across vowel contexts. The results are discussed in association with developmental coarticulation and the relationship between acoustic consequences of articulatory events and vowel height.

Study of Acoustic Properties of Nasal and Nonnasal Vowels in Temporal Domain

“…The work mentioned in [17] and [18] has been a great inspiration for this study. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II presents a brief description of the experiments carried out in the frequency domain.…”

Temporal and Aerodynamic Aspects of Velopharyngeal Coarticulation: Effects of Age, Gender and Vowel Height

“…Several studies reported that children exhibit a greater degree of anticipatory coarticulation than adults (Repp, 1986;Nittrouer & Whalen, 1989;Ha & Kuehn, 2006), while other studies indicate that children have less coarticulation than adult speakers (Thompson & Hixon, 1979;Hodge, 1989). A third set studies reported that adults and children exhibit approximately the same amount of coarticulation, yet children exhibited increased variability in their coarticulation (Turnbaugh, Hoffman, & Daniloff, 1985;Sereno, Baum, Marean, & Lieberman, 1987;Katz, Kripke, & Tallal, 1991;Goodell & Studdert-Kennedy, 1993;Katz & Bharadwja, 2001).…”

“…On the other hand, in a similar recent study, Ha and Kuehn (2006) compared the temporal characteristics of nasalization between 28 children between four to seven years and 28 adults. The authors obtained measurements of the absolute and proportional durations of the acoustic energy signal associated with VPC in target utterances /pamap/, /pimip/, and /pumup/.…”

“…Most studies conducted on coariculatorry patterns of children's speech have focused on labial and lingual coarticulation; few studies have investigated the effect of age on the extent of VPC (Thompson & Hixon, 1979;Flege, 1988;Ha & Kuehn, 2006). These few studies have not established consistent developmental patterns.…”

“…In addition, all studies on anticipatory lingual and labial coarticulation have used acoustic analysis to measure the degree of gestural overlap. Studies on VPC have employed aerodynamic analysis (Thompson & Hixon, 1979) and timing measurement from acoustic data (Flege, 1988;Ha & Kuehn, 2006). These studies have yielded inconsistent outcomes.…”