[en] The present study provided a detailed description of the
aerodynamic parameters of French nasalization in isolated
words, comparing patterns of contextual nasalization
across vowels contrasting for tongue height. Dependent
variables involve temporal measures of both the extent of
nasalization and its starting point relative to the vowelconsonant
boundary, and average flow rates across the
acoustically defined segments. Results show that the
general level of coarticulatory nasal airflow as well as its
temporal extent are significantly higher in /i, u, y/ than in
/E, e, ç, o, a/. These groups differ in tongue height as well
as in the presence vs. absence of a nasal counterpart in the
phonemic inventory of the language, so that studies on
other languages are necessary to further specify the role
of these factors in nasal coarticulation.
