Discriminant analysis of nasal vs. oral vowels in French : comparison between different parametric representations

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the realization of the [nasal] contrast in French by performing an acoustic analysis of naturally spoken nasal and oral vowels, and by carrying out discriminant analysis on these data. Results consistently show that generic parametric representations allow to reliably discriminate between nasals and orals. A specific issue addressed in this paper is the relationship between phonetic and phonological nasalization in French.