Language-specific and individual variation in anticipatory nasal coarticulation: A comparative study of American English, French, and German

Anticipatory contextual nasalization, whereby an oral segment (usually a vowel) preceding a nasal consonant becomes partially or fully nasalized, has received considerable attention in research that seeks to uncover predictive factors for the temporal domain of coarticulation. Within this research, it has been claimed that the phonological status of vowel nasality in a language can determine the temporal extent of phonetic nasal coarticulation. We present a comparative study of anticipatory nasal coarticulation in American English, Northern Metropolitan French, and Standard German. These languages differ in whether nasality is contrastive (French), ostensibly phonologized but not contrastive (American English), or neither (German). We measure nasal intensity during a comparatively large temporal interval preceding a nasal or oral control consonant. In English, coarticulation has the largest temporal domain, whereas in French, anticipatory nasalization is more constrained. German differs from English, but not from French. While these results confirm some of the expected language-specific effects, they underscore that the temporal extent of anticipatory nasal coarticulation can go beyond the preceding vowel if the context does not inhibit velum lowering. For all languages, the onset of coarticulation may considerably precede the pre-nasal vowel in VN sequences, especially so for English. We propose that in English, the pre-nasal vowel has itself become a source of coarticulation, making American English pre-nasal vowel nasality uninformative about coarticulatory nasalization. Degrees of individual variation between the languages align with the phonological or phonologized role of nasalization therein. Overall, our data further add to our understanding of the non-local temporal scope of anticipatory coarticulation and its language-specific expressions.