Some studies of European Portuguese nasal vowels using an articulatory synthesizer

In this paper we present some details of our work in the study of European Portuguese nasal vowels using an articulatory synthesizer. In the first part of the paper we describe some of the articulatory synthesizer characteristics motivated by the particularities of our object of study. In the second part we describe the realization of some experiments using the synthesizer. Experiments address the problems of: (1) static versus dynamic configurations in production of nasal vowels; (2) the relevance of the nostril radiated flux in the perception of nasality; and (3) the effect of nasal passage blocking in the perception of nasality. Results reported are preliminary due to the small number of tests performed.