Jj is for Jottings 49. Nasal Sounds – And I Don’t Mean Blowing Your Nose!
Nina is demonstrating how to say /n/: see – her tongue is up behind her top front teeth and of course the air is coming down her nose. She is actually starting to say “Nnnnina”. Clever girl.
When you have a head cold, people say you sound “nasal”, or “nasally”. In fact the opposite is true and you are in fact sounding denasal. Here’s how it works:
There are 3 nasal sounds – /m/, /n/, /ng/ (at the end of “sing”). For all other speech sounds your soft palate, which is at the back of your mouth and starts where the hard palate (roof of your mouth) ends, is raised, and this shuts off the air from going down your nose, directing it out of your mouth. When we use a nasal sound our soft palate is lowered, which blocks the air from coming through our mouth. If you have any experience of drafting animals on a farm, it is really the same thing. In that case there is a narrow shute which sends the animals along in single file, and at the end there is a gate and two separate yards. If you push the gate one way it sends the animals into one yard, and if you push it the other way they are sent to the other yard. In this way you can separate animals into two categories, whatever they might be at the time. The difference between the soft palate and the farm gate (apart from the obvious of one being part of the human body and the other being an inanimate object) is that the soft palate works up and down and the farm gate works from side to side.
When you are denasal as a result of being “stuffed up” with a cold, even though your soft palate is making the right movements, the air still can’t get down your nose because it is blocked by mucous. As a result, “my nose is running” becomes “by dose is ruddig”, since /b/ is made in the same place as /m/; /d/ is made in the same place as /n/; and /g/ is made in the same place as /ng/. If you are not completely stuffed up and some air is getting down your nose, you are hyponasal; if air goes down your nose for sounds which are not nasal sounds, you are hypernasal. (“Hypo” is the Greek root meaning “under” or “below” i.e. less than normal; “hyper” is, of course, the opposite and means “too”, “over”, “excessive”, beyond”). Any obstruction in the nose can cause hyponasality or denasality, and if the soft palate is insufficient to block off the nasal route (for whatever reason) you get hypernasality.
How is this related to literacy? I think that the more we understand about sounds, the better the position we are in to assist our children to read and spell, and anyway, if you didn’t already know it, I thought you might find it interesting!