The Duration of Telugu Speech Sounds: An Acoustic Study

Abstract

An acoustic investigation is made of the pattern of durations of individual phonetic segments in Telugu using sound-spectrograph and electro-kymograph. The discussion of phonetic variation in duration includes the following factors: (i) Intrinsic duration of segments of both vowels and consonants and its correlation with (a) vowel height, (b) consonant place, (c) consonant manner and (d) voicing; (ii) Influence of neighboring sounds on long vs short vowel and/or consonant; (iii) The relevance of position in an utterance; (iv) The behavior of consonants in sequences; and (v) The influence of number of syllables and segments in a word. Physical measurements reveal that each segment has its own inherent duration depending on its type, position in an utterance, surrounding phonetic context and the number of sounds/syllables.

Indexing terms:

• Acoustic-phonetic analysis
• Sound recognition
• Telugu speech