A couple weeks ago, I had the unfortunate pleasure of catching the common cold. With week three upon me, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience - I had to miss classes for a couple days just as they were beginning to get difficult, and I couldn’t think, see, or speak properly.
My roommate, caring man that he is, decided to check on me to make sure I was okay. In my groggy stupor, I attempted to say “Hey man, thanks, but I’ll be okay. Just missing linguistics and CS today.” What I actually said sounded like a combination of mucus and exhaustion, but something odd happened. I couldn’t properly pronounce “missing”, “linguistics”, “thanks”, or “okay”. It seemed that having a cold was affecting my phonetics.
Most of us have probably experienced this - having a congested nose limits our speech in key ways. Previously, I figured it would it affect certain types of sounds, but now that I’m on my way to becoming a certified linguist(ics student), I decided I might as well try to determine what a congested nose affects. After waiting a couple of days to get over my cold, I decided to conduct an experiment.
By experiment, I mean I pronounced as many words as possible while holding my nose shut. I started with the four above, and continued my search with words I would see in textbooks and on the internet in my casual browsing. In my not-so-rigorous experiment, I determined a couple rules:
- Velar sounds, like [k], [g], and [ŋ] are impossible to say properly with a thoroughly congested nose because air must be passing through the nasal cavity while those sounds are being made.
- Nasal sounds, like [m], [n], and [ŋ], are little more difficult because air is passing through the nose while those sounds are being made.
- Voiced sounds were a little more difficult only because they vibrate the oral passage, so those sounds tickle the throat and nose a little bit.
These findings were interesting, but I wanted to see what the internet might have to say about phonetics on a blocked nose.
After a little bit of searching, I found out that there are two kinds of nasally affected speech - hypernasal and hyponasal speech. A congested nose causes hyponasal speech, where the nasal passage is blocked. So, if you want to explain to people why you sound funny when you have a cold, just tell them you have hyponasal speech due to your congested nose. It’ll blow them away so much that they’ll leave you alone and you can get some rest for your cold.
I wanted to know what hyponasal speech looked like, and I found this fascinating website with videos (made with a procedure called Fiber Optic Transnasal Endoscopy) which showed how the velum and pharynx were affected in cases of hyponasal speech and hypernasal speech. I’ve put a link to the page at the bottom of this post.
I thought this was pretty fun - I saw how my phonetics changed because of certain conditions and I actually had the tools to discover what in particular was changing. I invite everyone to try something like this - maybe there are other conditions which the average person experiences that affects their personal phonetic qualities. I want to know!
Footnotes:
a. For those interested in the videos, check this page out - Faquier ENT
b. I also looked up videos of hyponasal speech. I geeked out a bit and spent way too much time watching videos of kids speaking with differing speech deficiencies. It was pretty cool. Youtube search for hyponasal speech
c. If the title threw you off, rhinopharyngitis is another name for the common cold.
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