The Contextual Effect of Intermediate Consonants of the Perception of Final Plosives

Abstract

Context dependency in the perception of final Hindi plosive consonants and distinctive features have been investigated as a function of the nature of adjacent sounds. VCC utterances comprising of 3 short vowels (/I/,/A/,/U/), two medial consonants (/s/,/I/) and 16 plosive consonants in the final position were recorded by 6 male speakers and heard by 10 listeners. Confusion matrices for final consonants were made separately for each medial consonantal context and analysed according to various feature systems using co-variance method of information transmission. It bas been found that voicing and aspiration are very much affected by the nature of preceding consonants. The results have been compared with earlier observations and discussed.

Indexing Terms:

• Feature Perception
• Speech Sounds

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S.S. Agrawal

Agrawal, S S (Dr): Born on January 1, 1942 in Hathras (UP). Received MSc (Physics with Electronics) and PhD (Physics) degrees from Aligarh Muslim University in 1965 and 1978 respectively. Worked as Lecturer in Physics from 1967 to 1970 in the same University. Since January, 1971 working as Scientist in the Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute and presently posted at its Delhi Centre.

Dr. Agrawal was invited to work as a Senior Fellow, a Specialist in Audio-Visual Technology at East-West Center, Honolulu, U.S.A. from September 1, 1978 to January 31, 1979 for “Visualizing Global Interdependencies”. He has the credit of producing many other Audio-Visual Programmes also.

His fields of interest are Speech Communication, Audio-Visual Techniques and Computer Utilization. He is currently engaged in research on Speaker Identification from Voice Patterns. He has participated in several national and international conferences and is author of large number of research papers and reports.

Dr. Agrawal is a member of IETE, Computer Society of India, Indian Science Congress Association and International Society of Phonetic Sciences.