Nasal Segments and Nasal Harmony: Field Phonetics and Typology

几乎所有的人类语言都有鼻音语音，例如英语的[m]和[n]辅音，以及法语的鼻音元音，使这些声音的语音和音韵学特性的研究成为我们科学理解人类语言语音系统的核心。对鼻音现象的详细的仪器研究主要局限于语言学家在实验室中容易接触到的语言，这导致了对鼻音系统相对同质的语言的关注。然而，一组多样且相对复杂的鼻音现象，如[bmb]和[nt]等复杂辅音，或如鼻音和声的语音过程，其中与一个语音相关的鼻音可以传播到整个单词，已经被描述为在远离语音实验室的社区中使用的语言。这些语言中的鼻音的几个方面对当前关于这些声音的认知/语音表征的科学理论提出了挑战，这些理论主要是在地理上有偏见的语言样本的基础上开发的。通过研究南美土著语言中的鼻音语音，这些语言表现出异常丰富和多样的鼻音现象，该项目有望产生重要的理论见解，了解语音生产的梯度性质与其离散的认知/语音分类之间的关系，这是人类语音系统科学研究的核心问题之一。这个多研究人员的项目利用了最近的技术进步，使研究鼻现象的设备更加便携。该项目的研究人员将配备相同的复杂语音设备和现场方法，与来自六个南美语系的十种语言的使用者一起工作，这些语言以其复杂的鼻现象而闻名。这项研究将有助于深入了解这些语言的鼻音系统，并有助于这些语言的文献，其中许多是高度濒危的。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.