Acoustic Cues of Vowel Quality to Coda Nasal Perception in Southern Min

This paper investigates the effect of vowel quality on the perception of coda nasals in Southern Min. The perceptual confusion experiment revealed that /m/ is the most confusable coda nasal, followed by /ŋ/ and then /n/. The high front vowel /i/ resulted in more misidentification of following coda nasals than mid vowel /ə/ and low vowel /a/. Within the same vowel context, higher formant frequency at the juncture of vowels and nasals and greater formant change from the midpoint to the endpoint of vowels provided more salient acoustic cues to place of articulation of post-vocalic nasals and thus resulted in higher accuracy of coda nasal identification.