Durational characteristics of Hindi consonant clusters

Various durations of closure, preceding vowel etc. have been studied in meaningful Hindi two consonant cluster words with stop consonants (such as /shptah/ (week) and //spl int//spl Lambda/ bd (word)). The data included 80 most frequently occurring clusters of the Hindi language. All these words were recorded by five male speakers and analysed using the Sensimetrics speech station software package. The analysis showed some very interesting features of the clusters such as closure duration of the clusters is found to play a very important role for die different categories of stop consonants. Further the duration of the voice bar and the vowel preceding the cluster (-C/sub 1/C/sub 2/) is shortened in a cluster words as compared to that for a non-cluster word.