Esther Kunay

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich | LMU · Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung

Velum position was analysed as a function of vowel height in German tense and lax vowels preceding a nasal or oral consonant. Findings from previous research suggest an interdependence between vowel height and the degree of velum lowering, with a higher velum during high vowels and a more lowered velum during low vowels. In the current study, data...

In the Chengdu Dialect of Mandarin, the /(V)an/ rime words have been described to have undergone a nasal loss process in the last decades. However, no acoustical or physiological evidence has been provided so far. In this study, we investigate this sound change process by directly looking at the velum gesture in the target segments from 4 Chengdu s...

Velum movement signals generated from real-time magnetic resonance imaging videos of thirty-five German speakers were used to investigate the physiological conditions that might promote sound change involving the development of contrastive vowel nasality. The results suggest that, in comparison to when a nasal consonant precedes a voiced obstruent,...

We present a method of using generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) to analyze midsagittal vocal tract data obtained from real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI) video of speech production. Applied to rt-MRI data, GAMMs allow for observation of factor effects on vocal tract shape throughout two key dimensions: time (vocal tract change over...

It has been suggested that the development of contrastive vowel nasality in VN sequences may depend partly on the nature of the following consonant. In particular, there may be a preference for VN sequences preceding voiceless oral consonants to be phonologized due to aerodynamic constraints on velum height, resulting in temporal overlap of the vow...

Using real-time MRI data related to velum movement in German, we find evidence that the effects of the aerodynamic constraint of a voiceless consonant in /VNC/ sequences are: temporal truncation of the velum gesture, reduction of the gesture magnitude, and shifting of the gesture peak toward the vowel. These effects may be the catalyst for a later...

Using real-time MRI data from German, we find evidence that the phonologization of vowel nasalization involves at least three steps, which occur in the following order: 1) The velum gesture is truncated (decreased N nasality); 2) The velum gesture aligns with the vowel interval (increased V nasality); 3) The oral gesture for the nasal consonant...

Dynamic MRI studies of the upper airway during speaking, singing or swallowing are complicated by the need for high temporal resolution and the presence of air-tissue interfaces that may give rise to image artifacts such as signal void and geometric distortions. This work exploits a recently developed real-time MRI technique to address these challe...