Measuring nasalance of Cantonese speaking males : a preliminary development

Abstract

The present study attempted to examine the possible effect of Cantonese tones on nasometric assessment. Speech stimuli consisted of four sets of monosyllabic words, each of which contained six words with the same segmental structure but different tones (e.g. 衣/ji1/, 椅/ji2/, 意/ji3/, 兒/ji4/, 耳/ji5/, 二/ji6/). Significant effect of Cantonese tone on nasalance in some monosyllabic words was revealed. In addition, with consideration of frequency of phonemes and tonemes of Hong Kong Cantonese, a Cantonese nasalance assessment protocol (10 oral sentences and 10 nasal-loaded sentences) was designed and validated. Similarities of mean, within-session reliability and across-session reliability were found between the present study and previous studies for oral sentences. Greater across-session reliability was noted for nasal sentences. Strong to very strong correlations were observed between composite sentences and their respective set of sentences as well as between spontaneous reading and reading with sentence by sentence modelling were found. Correlation between perceptual ratings and nasalance score were found to be moderately positive for oral sentences, but very weak for nasal sentences. Excellent intra-judge reliabilities were found for both raters and the inter-judge reliability was considered to be good for both sets of sentences. Differential findings in relation to oral and nasal sentences were discussed.