Nasalized vowels in conversational speech

Vowels are commonly nasalized in conversational speech. This happens in the context of a nasal consonant, and may be quite extensive. Here are some examples of naturally occurring talk which illustrate nasalization.

In this first example, from a Liverpool speaker, nasality is found both before and after a nasal consonant: in ‘don’t’ and in ‘anything’, nasality extends from the vowel portions to the subsequent consonant, and in the case of ‘anything’, the vowel after the alveolar nasal [n] is also nasalized.

The next example comes from the United States. This speaker produces, in the word ‘one’, a nasal consonant where the nasal airflow starts at the same time as the closure is achieved, meaning that she does not have nasality in the vowel before nasal consonants. On the other hand, vowels in the words ‘only’, ‘on’, ‘and’, ‘means’ and ‘committee’ are nasalized. The reason for this difference may lie in the fact that ‘one’ carries the main accent in this utterance, and it bears a falling intonation contour which starts high in her range.