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Velum movement in speech and inter-speech pause intervals: a cineradiographic study of French and English speech

  • Jahurul Islam EMAIL logo , Gillian de Boer and Bryan Gick
Published/Copyright: June 24, 2025
Phonetica
From the journal Phonetica Volume 82 Issue 4

Abstract

Velum behavior in speech production, particularly with nasal sounds, has been a matter of significant interest to researchers revealing many different factors that affect velum movement during speech events. Few studies, however, have explored velum movement patterns during inter-speech pauses compared to speech segments. To address this gap, we examined the velocity of velum movement during the production of both nasal sounds and inter-utterance pauses. We hypothesized that velum movement patterns differ between these two contexts and that language background may modulate these patterns. We analyzed velum movement in sentence-level speech of Québécois French and English speakers from the Université Laval X-ray videofluorography database. We measured the velopharyngeal opening (VPO) as the distance between the velum’s upper surface and the posterior pharyngeal wall. The change in VPO over time served as a proxy for the velocity of velum movement during speech segments and inter-speech pauses. We predicted faster velum movement during speech pauses and also faster movement for English relative to French speakers. Our results show that the velum behaves differently between speech and pause events in terms of the velocity and duration of the movement. In addition, velum behavior differs between languages, indicating language-specific articulatory configurations for the velum.

Keywords: velum movement velocity; English; French; speech pause; X-ray
Corresponding author: Jahurul Islam, University of British Columbia, Totem Field Studios, Room 228, 2613 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada, E-mail:

Funding source: National Institute of Health

Award Identifier / Grant number: DC-002717

Funding source: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Award Identifier / Grant number: RGPIN-2021-03751

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Charissa Purnomo, Annabelle Purnomo, Nicole Ebutt, Ama Murray, and Linda Wu for their assistance with data preparation. We would also like to thank Chiachih Lo, Ernest Tse, Hillary Smith and Erin Mawhinney for their assistance towards the initial annotation.

  1. Research ethics: This study utilized secondary data obtained from an existing and publicly available database. No primary data were collected, and the researchers did not have access to any personally identifiable information of the subjects.

  2. Author contributions: Md Jahurul Islam contributed to the conceptualization of the research problem, data preprocessing and analysis, and manuscript writing. Gillian de Boer contributed to the literature review, critically evaluated data processing and results, and co-wrote the manuscript. Bryan Gick provided overall project supervision, offering critical feedback on the conceptual framework, data analysis, results, and manuscript editing.

  3. Conflict of interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

  4. Research funding: This research was supported by the NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2021-03751) awarded to Bryan Gick and the National Institutes of Health Grant (DC-002717) awarded to Haskins Laboratories.

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Received: 2024-12-08
Accepted: 2025-05-31
Published Online: 2025-06-24
Published in Print: 2025-08-26

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Article
  3. Velum movement in speech and inter-speech pause intervals: a cineradiographic study of French and English speech
  4. Review Article
  5. Acoustic methods for analysing breathy and whispery voices: a systematic review
  6. Book Notice
  7. Stød in Danish proper names – in standard Danish pronunciation
https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2024-0052
Keywords for this article
velum movement velocity; English; French; speech pause; X-ray

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Article
  3. Velum movement in speech and inter-speech pause intervals: a cineradiographic study of French and English speech
  4. Review Article
  5. Acoustic methods for analysing breathy and whispery voices: a systematic review
  6. Book Notice
  7. Stød in Danish proper names – in standard Danish pronunciation
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