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

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.