Some acoustic features of nasal and nasalized vowels: a target for vowel nasalization

In order to characterize acoustic properties of nasal and nasalized vowels, these sounds will be considered as a dynamic trend from an oral configuration toward an [n]-like configuration. The latter can be viewed as a target for vowel nasalization. This target corresponds to the pharyngonasal tract and it can be modeled, with some simplifications, by a single tract without any parallel paths. Thus the first two resonance frequencies (at about 300 and 1000 Hz) characterize this target well. A series of measurements has been carried out in order to describe the acoustic characteristics of the target. Measured transfer functions confirm the resonator nature of the low-frequency peak. The introduction of such a target allows the conception of the nasal vowels as a trend beginning with a simple configuration, which is terminated in the same manner, so allowing the complex nasal phenomena to be bounded. A complete study of pole-zero evolutions for the nasalization of the 11 French vowels is presented. It allows the proposition of a common strategy for the nasalization of all vowels, so a true nasal vowel can be placed in this nasalization frame. The measured transfer functions for several French nasal vowels are also given.