Covariation of nasalization, tongue height, and breathiness in the realization of F1 of Southern French nasal vowels

In a variety of languages, changes in tongue height and breathiness have been observed to covary with nasalization in both phonetic and phonemic vowel nasality. It has been argued that this covariation stems from speakers using multiple articulations to enhance F1 modulation and/or from listeners misperceiving the articulatory basis for F1 modification. This study includes results from synchronous nasalance, ultrasound, EGG, and F1 data related to the realizations of the oral–nasal vowel pairs /ɛ/-/ɛ̃/, /a/-/ɑ̃/, and /o/-/ɔ̃/ of Southern French (SF) as produced by four male speakers in a laboratory setting. The aim of the study is to determine to what extent tongue height and breathiness covary with nasalization, as well as how these articulations affect the realization of F1. The following evidence is observed: (1) that nasalization, breathiness, and tongue height are used in idiosyncratic ways to distinguish F1 for each vowel pair; (2) that increased nasalization and breathiness significantly predict F1-lowering for all three nasal vowels; (3) that nasalization increases throughout the duration of the nasal vowels, supporting previous claims about the temporal nature of nasality in SF nasal vowels, but contradicting claims that SF nasal vowels comprise distinct oral and nasal elements; (4) that breathiness increases in a gradient manner as nasalization increases; and (5) that the acoustic and articulatory data provide limited support for claims of the existence of an excrescent nasal coda in SF nasal vowels. These results are discussed in the light of claims that the multiple articulatory components observed in the production of vowel nasalization may have arisen due to misperception-based sound change and/or to phonetic enhancement.