A study on vowel duration in Tamil: Instrumental approach

The multifaceted system of speech combines different disciplines of subjects and hence the scientific study in speech technology has become a challenging task. The time duration and Vowel duration are some of the important supra-segmental and complex speech properties discussed among the researchers. Generally, speech is composed of two important forms — vowels and consonants- and their separate acoustic analysis can be used in different areas of speech technology. This paper gives an abstract view on the statistical features of speech parameters such as duration and fundamental frequency/ Pitch of a set of vowels in the Tamil language. The data sets were created from recordings of male and female speakers individually in various selected speech sounds (mono syllabic words in Tamil). The vowels from each mono syllabic words are extracted and stored in a speech corpus for further analysis. The vowel duration, a fundamental frequency/pitch value of every vowel is measured from this corpus for analysis.