ACOUSTIC ASPECTS OF FRENCH NASAL VOWELS

The characteristics of French nasal vowels in the case of various CVCV combinations are studied. A set of CVCV utterances was read by speakers (5 males and 5 females) and analyzed using predictive coding techniques. The consonant consisted of voiced stops, unvoiced stops, nasal consonants... while the vowel V was one of 4 nasal French vowels. Vowel acoustic features such as formants and bandwidth frequencies, intensity, fundamental frequency and duration are studied. Most of the results obtained are in accordance with the acoustic theory. Differences between nasal and nasalized French vowels seem significant and the French nasal vowel characteristics seem as stable as those of the oral vowels. Application to speech synthesis and recognition is discussed. (Author) Documents acquired by EPIC include many informal unpublishe