¹ Some preliminary results of this study were reported in a paper entitled Separating the acoustic cues for nasal consonants by a tape-splicing technique, presented by this writer before the Experimental Phonetics Section of the Modern Language Association of America, 28 December 1954, in New York.

² Alvin M. Liberman, Pierre Delattre, Franklin S. Cooper, and Louis J. Gerstman, The role of consonant-vowel transitions in the perception of the stop and nasal consonants, Psychological monographs 68.8.1–13 (1954). Also, some later results were reported in a paper entitled Synthesized nasal consonants, by Malécot, Delattre, Cooper, and Liberman, presented before the Experimental Phonetics Section of the American Speech Association, December 1953, in New York.

³ For example, R-M. S. Heffner, General phonetics 141 (Madison, 1952), writes that ‘the major acoustic differences between the several types of nasal consonants are due to differences in the character of the oral resonator. This has its lowest range of frequencies for [m] and its highest for [ŋ], with an intermediate range for [n].‘ During the production of the nasal resonances, the oral resonator is, of course, coupled to the nasal resonator.

⁴ Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible speech (New York, 1947).

⁵ Martin Joos, Acoustic phonetics (Baltimore, 1948).

⁶ For a description of the techniques used in synthetic speech experiments, see Cooper, Liberman, and John M. Borst, The interconversion of audible and visible patterns asa basis for research in the perception of speech, Proc. Nat'l. Acad. Sci. 37.318–25 (Washington, 1950).

⁷ For a more detailed analysis of the role of transitions, see Delattre, Liberman, and Cooper, Acoustic loci and transitional cues for consonants, Jour. Acoust. Soc. Am. 27.769–73 (1955).

⁸ See Liberman et al., The role of consonant-vowel transitions.

⁹ Our procedures are an outgrowth of those described by Cyril Harris, A study of the building blocks of speech, Jour. Acoust. Soc. Am. 25.962–9 (1953), and by Carol Schatz, The role of context in the perception of stops, Lg. 30.47–56 (1954).

¹⁰ This is a normal value for voice pitch in the baritone range.

^10a Tables 1–5 are assembled at the end of the paper.

¹¹ The high percentages of m judgments may be partly due to our greater familiarity with this phone than with the others. Also, it is the only one of the three that is commonly uttered in isolation by American speakers ; it is used in humming, to fill in gaps in conversation during hesitation, and as a carrier for intonation expressions of surprise, affirmation, negation, etc.

¹² ‘The second formant transitions [also the third, it turned out later] which are regularly heard as b (or p) in the preceding test now give the cognate m, ... and η parallels d (or t) and ŋ parallels g (or k)‘—Cooper, Delattre, Liberman, Borst, and Gerstman, Some experiments on the perception of synthetic speech sounds, Jour. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24.602 (1952).

¹³ ‘There are some indications in the data that we are not dealing with a monovalent stimulus in this case; probably we shall have to explore variations in the supposedly neutral resonances‘—Cooper et al., ibid. 24.602.

¹⁴ In the opinion of Delattre, Principes de phonétique française à l'usage des étudiants anglo-américains ⁹ 9 (Middlebury, 1951), ‘Il est loisible de prendre les nasales pour des continues, mais ce sont plutôt des momentanées: bien qu'elles permettent au souffle de s'échapper par le nez, ce caractère n'est pas indispensable à la formation de la résonance nasale, comme on peut s'en rendre compte en prononçant un [m] le nez bouché à l'extérieur; ce qui est indispensable, c'est l'explosion buccale. La nasalité ne fait que modifier la résonance totale pendant la tenue et explosion, tout comme le voisement d'un [b] modifie sa résonance totale.’

The term ‘nasal stop’ must not, however, be confused with ‘nasalized stop’, which is defined by Kenneth Pike as ‘the sequence of a nasal followed by a stop, or the reverse, serving as a single phoneme’, Phonemics 243 (Ann Arbor, 1947).

¹⁵ From the results of work done at the Haskins Laboratories, it appears that this is not limited to nasals: ‘Two extensive experiments ... furnish strong indication that the irreducible acoustic stimulus of speech is not the phoneme but the syllable‘—Delattre, Cooper, Liberman, Monograph series on linguistics and language teaching 2.31–47 (1952).