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  Peter Roach

Can you have a nasal voice?

21/9/2019

9 Comments

 

The topic of nasality has come up on the Facebook page of Pronunciation Best Practice. A question asked there by Daniel Schulte made me check on what Wikipedia has to say on the topic, and this has raised some other issues concerning the WP material.
 
Here's the original question:

I've got a question about nasality (not only the m n ing sounds)

as far as I know: The air from the lung can flow through your mouth and nose ok. when the air flows a lot through your nose the voice sounds nasal. but why does a blocked nose (a cold or pressing the nose together with your fingers) lead to a nasal voice when its actually causing that the air is only flowing through your mouth?

also: is the fact that some accents (standard general american compared to standard southern british, or portuguese compared to spanish) sound more nasal, a direct consequence of the exact tongue/lips/jaw configuration within the vowel chart or is that a separate, independent aspect? thanks.


The first response posted to this question was from Anthony Lauder:

Before you can release air through your nose you have to first build up air pressure in the nose. The more "blocked" the nose, the more pressure you can build, and the more "nasal" the sound will be. When you have a cold, then, it blocks the nose and helps create that air pressure leading to nasal sounds.

This was followed by a contribution from Petr Roesel.

When you block your nose, the velum usually hangs down, i.e. the nose as a resonator is added to the oral cavity. This enhances certain frequency bands, which cause the impression of nasality


The comment I added to this Facebook discussion was this:

In answer to Daniel Schulte, it's a fallacy that a blocked nose leads to a "nasal voice". Read the Wikipedia article on Nasalization, and note "Denasalization". See also the WP article on Hypernasal speech. If American or Portuguese speech sounds more nasalised, that must be because the speech contains more nasalised vowels (phonemes or allophones) than the accents you are comparing them with. Nothing to do with tongue/lips/jaw configurations. In answer to Anthony Lauder, I'm afraid you've got it completely wrong. It's nothing to do with pressure, and if anything the more blocked the nose is, the LESS nasalised the sound will be. And Petr Roesel, please can you tell me where you got the evidence that the velum is lowered when the nose is blocked?


So far, nobody else has joined in the discussion. Since I recommended reading relevant bits of Wikipedia on the subject, I thought I ought to check on what there is. There's a good article on Nasal vowel and another on Nasal consonant (though editors have flagged problems with references in this latter article). In addition there is an article on Nasalization, which contains quite a lot of information relevant to the question, and contains a brief section on Denasalization, with a link to a separate article on this topic. The article on Denasalization contains a few questionable points. It states "When one speaks with a cold, the nasal passages still function as a resonant cavity so a denasalized nasal [m͊] does not sound like a voiced oral stop [b], and a denasalized vowel [a͊] does not sound like an oral vowel [a]." It seems to me that the nasal passages are only likely to function as a resonant cavity if the soft palate (velum) is lowered, as would be the case in the two examples given. When the soft palate is raised, it seems to me that the nasal cavity must be effectively sealed off from the vocal tract, hence my query to Petr Roesel.

The other worrying thing in the Denasalization article is the statement that "[Denasalization] ... occurs when the sinuses are blocked from a common cold, when it is called a nasal voice". The article adds the caution that this "is not a linguistic term". It turns out there is a Wikipedia article on Nasal voice, and I must say I don't feel very happy about it from the phonetic point of view. The lead section says "A nasal voice is a type of speaking voice characterized by speech with a 'nasal' quality", and a comment has been added on the Talk page of this article, correctly pointing out that this "definition" is "self-referential and therefore not helpful". A WP editor has added a [clarification needed] note. The lead continues "It can also occur naturally because of genetic variation.", which seems to me meaningless as it stands. The article then states that the term Nasal voice may be used to refer both to hyponasal and to hypernasal speech (i.e. speech with too little nasality or too much), thus referring to two opposite entities. This view would, if correct, support the implication in the original question by Daniel Schulte that a blocked nose (causing hyponasality) would lead to "nasal voice", but there seems little or no justification for using the term "nasal voice" in this way. The article's citations to justify the use of the term are two: one is a brief note in the website of an American speech therapy clinic, which talks about Nasal sounding voice and warns that "Nasal voice is an incorrect term as the voice itself is normal". The other citation is of a short section of a textbook called Basic Clinical Radiobiology , and the article seems to be largely based on this work. I need to do some more reading about this topic in the speech pathology literature, to see how widely used the term nasal voice is there, but my current feeling is that from the phonetic point of view the article is of doubtful value.

9 Comments
Salah link
21/9/2019 08:44:10 pm

Dear professor,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I would refer to an example concerning "denasalisation". In Iraqi Arabic, we use the word "Timman" ['tɪm.mən] meaning "rice" (Standard Arabic /ruz/). When an Iraqi gets severe coldness, in this case, the nasal passages do not function properly, hence the word "Timman" will be pronounced as ['tɪb.bən]. According to the severity of the coldness, a "median condition" appears where a sound that is neither /m/ nor /b/, but in between but nearer to nasal /m/ with a little mixture of /b/ as if we have "nasal /b/. I hope this contribution is useful and explains a little of what has been published by others.

Reply
Peter
22/9/2019 08:53:41 am

Thank you, that's a good example. Do you think the final /n/ would also be affected in the same way?

Reply
Eric Armstrong
21/9/2019 10:04:07 pm

As a speaking voice teacher at an acting program in Canada, I find that the usage of “nasal” to stand for either nasal or denasal speech to be quite common among my voice students. Each year around this time, I ask my students to write about their perception of their own voice, and many students report that they feel that they have a “nasal” voice, when it’s clear from their comments that what they actually have is a denasal voice (due, for example, to chronic allergies.) Though some people are aware of hypo/hyper nasality differences, in my experience, most do not. The soft palate is a mysterious thing to them, and learning to feel and hear its impact on their speech is a long and slow process.

Reply
Peter
22/9/2019 08:57:26 am

Interesting comment, thank you. I am beginning the feel that, although from my point of view, thinking in terms of phonetic theory, the term "nasal voice" is not an appropriate one, for people in some other fields it may be meaningful and useful.

Reply
Sidney Wood link
22/9/2019 01:44:31 pm

Regarding the blocked nose situation (colds etc). Classical phonetics recognised 'open' (as for n, m and nasal vowels) and 'closed' (as in a "cold in the dose") nasality. There is still nasal resonance in closed nasality - the velum is still open, and the nasal passage is still coupled to the oral passage, but the nasal passage is occluded somewhere. Vibration in the nasal passage is reflected back from the nasal occlusion (in open nasality the vibration is reflected back from the open nostrils).

Standing waves will occur between the larynx and nastrils (or the nasal occlusion), and between the larynx and lips (or any oral occlusion). These distances are rarely equal, so the nasal and oral standing waves will rarely coincide. Usually they'll be different, augmenting each other at some frequencies, interfering with each other at other frequencies. We hear the final mix, not the nasal and oral components independantly.

Reply
Peter
22/9/2019 08:10:31 pm

Thanks for explaining this. I take it that when you say "There is still nasal resonance in closed nasality - the velum is still open, and the nasal passage is still coupled to the oral passage", I take it that you are referring to cases of closed nasality where the velum is lowered for a nasal consonant or nasalized vowel. I am assuming that other segments, such as plosives, fricatives, non-nasalized vowels etc., would have the velum raised, and consequently little or no acoustic coupling to the rest of the vowel tract.
The distinction between open and closed nasality is new to me, and I need to look through Wikipedia to see if it's been included anywhere. Could you let me have a reference, please?

Reply
Sidney Wood link
24/9/2019 12:33:54 am

Your query, yes, closed nasality would occur during a nasal or nasaliized vowel or nasal stop. There's no way you can control a nasal occlusion, except by pinching your nostrils. We can't discipline a nasal occlusion into a linguistic contrast, it has to be intrusive, for example during a common cold or chronic congestion.

I'm sorry I don't have a reference for 'open/closed nasality' - I gave away all my basic and elementary books when I retired. Gunnar Fant was familiar with the expression and it occurs in The Acoustic Theory of Speech Production, chapter 2.4 pages 139-161.

Sidney Wood link
24/9/2019 05:10:04 pm

The origial query had a second part, concerning accents, or even languages that "sound nasal".

Starting with an individual speaker, and discounting pathology (like clefts or inflamed adenoids preventing an airtight seal), any unexpected nasal resonance must come from the velum being lowered when it ought to be raised. Remember that lowering or raising the velum are planned activities, requiring muscles to be programmed and activated. So someone with unusually nasal speech is actively adding the nasality (for whatever reason, consciously or unconsciously). Now, this would most easily be done during a vowel. For oral or nasal stops, the muscles of the velum will already be programmed and incorporated into the motor program for the whole consonant. For fricatives, nasal closure is essential for achieving the necessary aerodynamic conditions for the appropriate turbulence, and even trickier to reprogramme to add a touch of nasality. That said, anything is possible at this idiosyncratic level of one speaker.

We are social creatures and tend to acquire the local accent. So if everyone in that region likes to hear a hint of nasality, that will become the model for local speech acquisition, and linguists would come and listen and declare the local dialect to be nasal. And if dialects can do it, why not whole languages?

Back to Portuguese, that has both oral and nasal vowels. Is that inventory enough to generalise to "it sounds nasal"? Especially if linguists dispute the phonemic or allophonic status of the nasal vowels? Does the phonology count? If so, does French sound nasal? Or does the nasal character of some language have to be linguistically neutral to count as "sounds nasal". The tourist wouldn't know, and probably wouldn't care. He'd go to Portugal for a week and come home with stories of locals with stuffy noses.

Reply
Kelly Olson link
23/2/2021 02:04:35 am

Goood read

Reply



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    A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics

    Peter Roach

    Emeritus Professor of Phonetics,
    ​University of Reading, UK

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