Acoustic analysis of oral and nasal Hindi vowels spoken by native and non-native speakers

Abstract

This paper presents acoustic analysis of Hindi oral and nasal vowels as spoken by the native Hindi speakers and non-native speakers belonging to Punjabi and Nepali linguistic backgrounds. The objective of the study is to determine the measurable acoustic parameters of Hindi vowel sounds which can be used to distinguish oral and nasal vowels by Hindi speakers on one hand and the effect on these parameters due to non-native speakers on the other hand. The database consists of 150 phonetically rich sentences uttered by 10 speakers of each language in a sound treated room. These were analysed using PRATT and Wave Surfer software tools. Five long Hindi vowels (oral as well as nasalized) i.e. /i/, /ɛ/, /a/, /ɔ/ and /u/ were selected for this study and segmented from the sentence utterances. The parameters such as frequencies, amplitude of formants and the pitch and intensity values at the steadiest portion of the vowels were computed. The results show several parameters which distinguishes oral vowel from Nasal vowels as well as the effect of languages of Non-native speakers on Hindi Vowels. Significant observations and the results of the study have been discussed in detail in this paper.