Nosey judgments: What does it mean to sound “nasal”?

The terms “nasal” or “nasally” are often applied to voices by laypersons. Aside from changes induced by congestion, where the term is often applied paradoxically, the description of nasality in a voice is also applied to some dialects and used in negative judgments of voice aesthetics. In dialect research, nasalence correlates weakly or not at all with perceptual judgments, and similar results have been found in singing. To assess the acoustics of such judgments, 22 English listeners rated 60 voices reading the same 15 word list for how nasal they thought each voice sounded using a visual analog scale with endpoints labeled “non nasal” and “nasal.” Interrater reliability was moderate (α = 0.72), but similar to expert judgments of nasality for singers. These nasality judgments were then correlated with acoustic features typical of nasality (A1-P0, F1 bandwidth) and breathiness (spectral tilt, HNR) for both the nasal vowel in the word list and the non-nasal vowels, as well as holistic perceptual judgments of breathiness and stereotypicality. Results demonstrated that acoustic measures for nasality and spectral tilt only weakly correlated with perceived nasality and only for women’s voices, while perceptual judgments of the voice typicality were stronger and found for both genders.