Revisiting the nasal continuum hypothesis: A study of French nasals in continuous speech

Speech sounds are generally classified as either nasal or oral, with the velopharyngeal opening (VPO) characterized as simply open or closed. This account contrasts with clinical perspectives, in which the degree of VPO is described as being more continuous. An examination of laboratory studies of French suggests a third possibility, in which the VPO may have multiple distinct degrees of opening. Based on this limited literature we predicted that the VPO of Québécois French would be largest for speech pauses, then in descending order, phonemically nasal vowels, nasal consonants, contextually nasal vowels (with carryover being larger than anticipatory), and finally oral sounds. We analyzed full sentences read by nine speakers of Québécois French from the Université Laval X-ray videofluorography database. The films were annotated, and degrees of VPO were measured from the sagittal projections of the vocal tract. We found evidence for most of the proposed distinctive VPO targets in Québécois French, with the exception that anticipatory nasalization led to greater VPO than carryover nasalization.