Nasometric values for european portuguese: preliminary results

Abstract

Nasal sounds frequencies in European Portuguese represent 21% of Português Fundamental corpus sounds (Nascimento et al. 1987), revealing how nasality plays an important role in this language and how a speech problem affecting nasality can interfere severely in one’s speech intelligibility. In order to obtain the first standard nasometric values for European Portuguese we developed two tests (syllable repetition and text reading) and collected data from 25 adults. Preliminary results showed that: oral stimuli achieved an average nasalance score of 10%; syllables with nasal consonant and nasal vowel achieved 77% and the reading passages with nasal saturation presented an average score of 44%. Considering these results, we acknowledge the existence of three different levels of normal nasality.