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Is vowel nasalisation phonological in English? A systematic review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2017

MARTIN KRÄMER
MARTIN KRÄMER*
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Culture, University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway, 9037 Tromsø, [email protected]
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Abstract

Vowel nasalisation in American English has been the subject of a long discussion as to whether it is a phonological process or whether it should better be analysed as phonetic coarticulation. As a predictable allophonic process, vowel nasalisation also provides a testing ground for theories of lexical representation, since if it turns out that language users store this predictable information in long-term memory, there is no reason to assume any kind of phonological underspecification. In this article, experimental studies on this phenomenon are reviewed with these two questions in mind: is the phenomenon a phonological process at all and is this predictable information, i.e. vowel nasalisation, stored in the mental lexicon. The majority of studies provide evidence supporting the phonological view and underspecified lexical representations.

Keywords

American Englishphonologyphoneticsvowel nasalisationexperimental evidencelexiconunderspecification
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 405 - 437
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Patrick Honeybone for their helpful suggestions.

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