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Nasal-Oral Contrast of Short and Long Vowels in Twi: An Acoustic Study
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... They are not nasalised because they follow nasal letters (m, n), rather, speakers of the language spontaneously nasalise all vowels. It takes a longer time to pronounce words with nasals, adding to the several reasons why Twi words generally take longer to pronounce (Manyah, 2011). ...
... When visual search for target stimuli are distinguished from distractors by a unique feature, such as colour, it becomes fast, efficient, and subjectively effortless owing to pop-out effects (Treisman & Gormican, 1988). Numerous studies have shown that negative priming effects increase when subjects are induced to anticipate selection difficulty between target and distractor stimuli (Fox, 1994;Gamboz, Russo, & Fox, 2000;Houghton, Tipper, Weaver, & Shore, 1996;Pritchard & Neumann, 2009, 2011. ...
In the current experiments, within- and between-language primed lexical decision tasks with Twi-English bilinguals were used. The aim was to explore the priming effects produced by attended and ignored words, in an effort to draw theoretical and empirical parallels and differences between the mechanisms of excitation and inhibition and to isolate the different circumstances in which these mechanisms operate in bilingual language processing. In the within-language (Twi) experiment, facilitatory (positive) priming resulted when a prime word and subsequent probe target word were identical, whereas delayed decisions to probe targets (negative priming) ensued when the ignored prime word was conceptually identical to the subsequent probe target word. In contrast, while the between-language (Twi-English) experiments replicated the ignored repetition negative priming effect, no evidence of positive priming was observed. These between-language findings undermine episodic retrieval models of selective attention that discount inhibitory processes in negative priming paradigms. Instead, our findings substantiate inhibition-based accounts by showing that there are two sources of inhibition operating at the local word and global language levels of abstraction. The findings also support bilingual language representations in which the words of the two languages are integrated.
Simultaneous photoelectric (photonasography) and video-fiberscopic technique was used to evaluate the difference in the temporal patters of French nasal vowels among acoustics (Vn), velopharyngeal port opening/closing (OV), and velar movements (MV) for two speakers. As expected MV starts before OV and it also starts before the vowel acoustic onset Vn for the two speakers. The opening phase of the velopharyngeal port is longer than the closing phase. The velum position (height) necessary to open the velopharyngeal port appears to be constant regardless of the identity of the nasal vowels and phonetic contexts.
A l’oral comme à l’écrit, le twi, une langue à tons ponctuels, possède un contraste entre deux longueurs dans des mots. La quantité est ainsi employée pour des distinctions lexicales et grammaticales où la voyelle, nasale ou orale, est soit brève soit longue. Cette étude présente les observations et résultats d’une recherche expérimentale sur les voyelles nasales brèves et longues. Les valeurs acoustiques absolues, émanant de la production des voyelles nasales des deux catégories phonologiques par deux locuteurs adultes, montrent que la durée vocalique est le paramètre privilégié à distinguer les deux séries. Le contrôle de la qualité vocalique entre les deux classes phonologiques montre de très faibles différences formantiques ou qualitatives.
En parcourant cet ouvrage vous irez à la rencontre d'une culture et d'une langue akan/twi très riche (écriture, prononciation, tons, harmonie vocalique, quantité, nasalité) du Ghana. La grammaire présente verbes, adjectives, adverbes, conjonctions, pronoms, possessifs, règles de conjugaison. L’ouvrage aborde les expressions idiomatiques, les situations de communications, tells que l’échange de salutations, et la formulation des questions.
Ce livre propose également une série de conversations sur des thèmes choisis (famille, marché, métiers, nourriture et santé) ainsi que des aspects de la culture : la royauté, l’artisanat, le symbolisme, le mariage, les funérailles, les noms, la poésie, les chansons et quelques proverbes, leur traduction littérale et leur équivalence française.
La méthode se termine par un lexique de plus de quatre mille deux cents entrées dans les deux sens : twi-français et français-twi.
Cet ouvrage est un outil fort utile permettant l’apprentissage du twi aux chercheurs, étudiants, touristes et apprenants francophones.
In certain Eastern Algonquian languages a nasal vowel developed from the long low vowel/a:/, regardless of consonantal context. A series of experiments showed that longer vowels (regardless of height) were perceived as more nasalized than shorter ones, but only when some nasalization was actually present. Further experiments showed no evidence of an increase in nasalization for long vowels in oral contexts. If some nasalization was nonetheless introduced (either randomly or by a general increase in nasalization) into these languages, the vowels most likely to be perceived as nasalized were the long ones. This perceptual process may have been responsible for this unusual historical development.
This paper presents data analysis about the relationships between the lip shapes and the acoustic cues of French oral, nasal and nasalized vowels. The comparison of the productions of French and American English Speakers evidences the necessity of a labial adjustment to distinguish the French oral and nasal vowels. The required labial adjustment is specified by two distinct gestures: the rounding and the protrusion. The acoustic consequences of these gestures as cues are predicted from acoustic theory and are observed in the vowel spectra.
This paper describes the production of the nasal vowel of the southern french, comparing with the nasal vowel of a more standard french. The data consist in aerodynamic measures, recording simultaneously the speech signal, the nasal airflow and the oral airflow which allow to quantify when the nasalisation starts during the production. Global analysis show (i) the nasalisation in southern french starts later than in standard french and (ii) nasal vowels don't really appear in southern french.