Realization of Telugu r-phoneme in intervocalic position: An acoustic study

The acoustic characteristics of the phonetic instantiations of a phoneme of a language play a key role in language specific applications such as language identification, speech transcription as text, text-to-speech synthesis and so on. Significant differences exist among different languages and even within the Indian languages, in the realization of phonemes. Hence, acoustic characteristics of members of a phoneme in one language cannot be directly accepted to characterize similar phoneme in another language to accuracies required for language specific applications. Very limited results are available on the phonetic-acoustic characteristics of Telugu consonants. A focused attention is needed for such an analysis of Telugu phone groups based on manner articulation and place of articulation. In this paper some acoustic features of the two allophones of Telugu r-phoneme are studied. The features considered are trill patterns, tap or trill duration, spectral envelope, formants and antiformants at the tap instant. Tap or Trill duration and formant shifts from consonant into or from the context vowels are quantified for intervocalic position of r-phoneme. The rank statistics are used for ensemble analysis. ANOVA analysis is carried out for formant shifts and phone duration.