Survey of the Chinese

Introduction By de"nition, nasal consonants are produced by an oral closure and a velopharyngeal opening (House, 1957; Stevens, 1998). Nasalized vowels are produced with an oral opening and a velopharyngeal opening. The goal of this study of Standard Chinese disyllabic words is to determine the acoustic pattern which signals that a syllable contains a nasal coda and to specify the acoustic attributes that distinguish between the two places of articulation for a nasal coda. The vowel preceding the nasal coda was examined for nasalization to con"rm the presence of a nasal coda. In addition, in cases where oral closure is not realized in the articulation of the nasal consonant, the nasalized vowel is the only cue for place of the intended consonant. The results of this study may be useful to research into speech synthesis and speech modeling of vowels in nasal contexts and is intended to deepen our understanding of the perceptual cues for nasal place in Standard Chinese. With further te