This paper investigates the language independence and speaker-specificity of the nasal consonants /m/ and /n/ in multilingual speakers. The research aims to determine how these nasal sounds manifest across different languages and whether their spectral properties − specifically the centre of gravity (COG) and standard deviation (SD) − remain consistent within individual speakers regardless of the language spoken.
Methodology:
Data were collected through studio recordings of read speech from nine young, balanced bilingual speakers with Catalan and Spanish as their first languages and a proficient level of English as an additional language.
Data and analysis:
Statistical analyses were conducted to compare the COG and SD values across languages and speakers, with the aim of measuring both within-speaker and between-speaker variability and within-speaker and between-language variability.
Findings:
The findings support the hypothesis that the spectral properties of /m/ and /n/ remain stable across the three languages, demonstrating low within-speaker variability. Moreover, the results confirm the speaker-specificity of these traits, as they exhibit greater variability between different speakers than within the same speaker. Consequently, these results suggest that nasal consonants are speaker-specific across multiple languages.
Originality:
This study provides further evidence supporting the speaker-specificity of nasal consonants in multilingual speakers. Although research areas such as forensic linguistics have examined within- and between-speaker variability in various sounds, including nasals, research remains scarce involving multilingual speakers.
Implications:
The research advances the fields of phonetics and multilingualism by enhancing our understanding of how linguistic and indexical information interconnect across different languages.
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