Spectral and temporal cues to nasality: insights from a speech perception study.

International audienceSpectral and temporal cues to the recognition of French nasals are in- vestigated through the identification of 20 consonants and 13 vowels that were passed through a channel vocoder. Spectral and amplitude envelope resolution were manipulated independently. The impact of spectral vs. temporal resolution on speech recognition is assessed in 2 forced-choice experiments respectively adressing the identification of consonants and vowels. The results show that nasal vowels exhibit a behaviour that mas- sively differs from both oral and nasal consonants as well as from oral vowels. Acoustic analyses of formant information were performed in or- der to assess the availability of static spectral cues in vowel stimuli. Our data seem to confirm the availability of discriminant formant information in both oral and nasal vowels. Further directions are offered that would help understand the present data