EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Durational Characteristics of Hindi Stop Consonants

K. Samudravijaya

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India

A study of the durational characteristics of Hindi stop consonants in spoken sentences was carried out. An annotated and time-aligned Hindi speech database was used in the experiment. The influences of aspiration, voicing and gemination on the durations of closure and post-release segments of plosives as well as the duration of the preceding vowel were studied. It was observed that the post-release duration of a plosive changes systematically with manner of articulation. However, due to its large variation in continuous speech, the post-release duration alone is not sufficient to identify the manner of articulation of Hindi stops as hypothesised in earlier studies. A low value of the ratio of the duration of a vowel to the closure duration of the following plosive is a reliable indicator of gemination in Hindi stop consonants in continuous speech.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Samudravijaya, K. (2003): "Durational characteristics of hindi stop consonants", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 81-84.