The perception of anticipatory nasality in English, French, and German

The goal of the current paper is to study the perception of long-distance anticipatory nasality in three languages – American English, Northern Metropolitan French, and Standard German. The study thereby links explicitly to our previous production study which was able to show that nasality can, in all three languages, spread beyond the prenasal vowel in CVN words. Nonetheless, there were significant differences between languages in terms of the temporal scope of coarticulation and within- and between-speaker variability. We ask whether listeners use coarticulatory information in the signal as early as it is available in their language. The results of our eyetracking study are generally in agreement with this hypothesis. Among the languages studied here, German and American listeners are sensitive to early nasality information in the speech signal. French listeners, however, seem to respond to coarticulatory cues to contextual nasality to a lesser degree. For English, our results support the hypothesis that the domain of nasality in VN is the rhyme, not just the nasal coda consonant. This means that vowel nasality in VN sequences in American English differs fundamentally from the anticipatory coarticulation seen in French and German.