A velopharyngeal fricative, also known as a posterior nasal fricative, is a sound produced by some children with speech disorders, including some with a

cleft palate A cleft lip contains an opening in the upper lip that may extend into the nose. The opening may be on one side, both sides, or in the middle. A cleft palate occurs when the palate (the roof of the mouth) contains an opening into the nose. The te ...

, as a substitute for

sibilant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...

s (), which cannot be produced with a cleft palate. It results from "the approximation but inadequate closure of the upper border of the velum and the posterior pharyngeal wall."Martin Duckworth, George Allen, William Hardcastle & Martin Ball (1990) ‘Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for the transcription of atypical speech.’ Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 4: 4, p. 276. To produce a velopharyngeal fricative, the soft palate approaches the pharyngeal wall and narrows the velopharyngeal port, such that the restricted port creates

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

turbulence in air forced through it into the nasal cavity. The articulation may be aided by a posterior positioning of the tongue and may involve velar flutter (a snorting sound). The term 'velopharyngeal' indicates "articulation between the upper surface of the velum and the back wall of the naso-pharynx." The base symbol for a velopharyngeal fricative in the

extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...

for disordered speech is , and

secondary articulation In phonetics, secondary articulation occurs when the articulation of a consonant is equivalent to the combined articulations of two or three simpler consonants, at least one of which is an approximant. The secondary articulation of such co-articu ...

is indicated with a double tilde, . The following variants are described: * A voiceless velopharyngeal fricative * A voiced velopharyngeal fricative * A velopharyngeal fricative trill or "snort" (much as epiglottal fricatives tend to be trilled): **voiceless ( Feng trill

) **voiced *Other consonants accompanied by velopharyngeal frication, such as = ,A double tilde might be confused with doubling the nasal tilde used to indicate that a sound is heavily nasalized potentially transcribed with an additional to overtly indicate accompanying trill. The letter for the trill was only adopted in 2015; before then the letter stood for both. Some authorities describe the trilled velopharyngeals as being accompanied by

uvular trill The voiced uvular trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital letter ''R''. This consonant is one of several collectivel ...

rather than velar flutter. Whether this is a difference in interpretation or of pronunciation, it would be explicitly transcribed with a superscript : voiceless () and voiced .

External links

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Consonants (ExtIPA symbols)
(click on in the chart for a plain )

References

Speech disorders Fricative consonants Nasal consonants {{phonetics-stub

See also

External links

References