An acoustic analysis of nasal sounds (/M, N/) in Turkish

The aim of this study is to examine the acoustic properties of nasal sounds in Turkish. Words containing nasal sounds read by six monolingual Turkish speakers were analyzed. For each token, the duration of the nasal, nasal resonance frequencies, and the frequencies of the formant transition onsets were measured. The findings showed that the mean durations were 78 ms for /m/ and 63 ms for /n/. Nasal resonance frequencies for /m/ were 243 Hz, 1051 Hz and 2197 Hz, respectively. For /n/, nasal resonance values were 248 Hz, 1113 Hz and 2255 Hz, respectively. The formant transition onsets for /m/ were 357 Hz, 1262 Hz and 2587 Hz, respectively, for /n/ were 361 Hz, 1501 Hz and 2782 Hz. The results also showed that the position within a word has an effect on the duration of the nasal sound; the duration of /m/ was significantly higher than that of /n/ in all of the positions within a word. First and third nasal resonances were significantly lower for /m/ than for /n/ in certain contexts. Second nasal resonance values, on the other hand, were significantly lower for /m/ and /n/ at word-initial syllable-initial and word-final syllable-final positions as well as in back vowel contexts. F2 transition was significantly lower for /m/ than /n/ in all of the positions within a word and in all of the vowel contexts. Similarly, F3 transition was significantly lower for /m/ than for /n/ in all of the positions within a word and in front-vowel contexts.