Almost all human languages have nasal speech sounds, such as the [m] and [n] consonants of English, and the nasal vowels of French, making the study of the phonetic and phonological properties of these sounds central to our scientific understanding of the sound systems of human languages. Detailed instrumental studies of nasal phenomena have been limited primarily to languages that are easily accessible to linguists based in laboratories, which has resulted in a focus on languages with relatively homogenous nasality systems. However, a diverse and comparatively complex set of nasal phenomena, such as complex consonants like [bmb] and [nt], or phonological processes such as nasal harmony, in which the nasality associated with one speech sound can spread across an entire word, have been described for languages spoken in communities more distant from phonetics laboratories. Several aspects of nasality in these languages pose challenges for current scientific theories regarding the cognitive/phonological representations of these sounds, which have been developed primarily on the basis of a geographically biased sample of languages. By studying nasal speech sounds in indigenous languages of South America, which exhibit an unusually rich and diverse set of nasal phenomena, this project promises to yield important theoretical insights into the relationship between the gradient nature of production of speech sounds and their discrete cognitive/phonological categorization, one of the central issues in the scientific investigation of human speech sound systems.
This multi-researcher project takes advantage of recent technological advances that have made equipment for studying nasal phenomena more portable. Researchers in this project will be deployed with identical sets of sophisticated phonetic equipment and field methodologies to work with speakers of ten languages from six South American language families known for their complex nasal phenomena. This research will both yield insights into the nasal systems of these languages and contribute to the documentation of these languages, many of which are highly endangered.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
