This study investigated the phonemic status of the nasal vowels in Bangla (aka Bengali). It has been claimed for decades that all the seven monophthongal oral vowels in Bangla have phonemically ...contrastive nasal counterparts; however, an in-depth investigation of the status of nasality for all the vowels is lacking in the current literature. With a phoneme dictionary build from a text corpus of 8 (eight) million word-tokens and about 275 thousand word-types, this study investigated whether all the oral vowels have phonemically contrastive nasal vowels. Findings revealed that only five of the seven monophthongal vowels form phonemically contrastive relationships with their nasal counterparts; nasality in /æ/ and /ɔ/ are not contrastive phonemically.
In the general study of speech and phonetics, vowels have stood in second place to consonants. But what vowels are, how they differ from one another, how they vary among speakers, and how they are ...subject to disorder, are questions that require a closer examination.
This Handbook presents a comprehensive, cogent, and up-to-date analysis of the vowel, including its typical development in children's speech, description by perceptual and instrumental methods, cross-linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects, and disorders of its production and use. It approaches the problems of vowel production and perception from the viewpoints of physiology, physics, psychology, linguistics, phonetics, phonology, and speech-language pathology. The chapters are logically complementary, and the major sections of the book are like key dimensions of understanding, each adding a perspective and base of knowledge on vowels. The sum total of the chapters is a synthesis of information on vowels that has no precedent.
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