Speech and Vision Lab

Speech is the most important and common means of communication. Human beings identify a language by looking at the acoustics and the letter to sound rules (LTS) that govern the language. But pronunciation is governed by the person’s exposure to his/her native language. This is a major issue while considering words, especially nouns in Indian languages. In this paper, a new methodology of analyzing phoneme durations for language discrimination is presented. The work has been carried out on a database built with words, mostly nouns, common to Hindi, Tamil and Telugu languages. Durational analysis of phonemes has been carried out on the collected database. Our results show that phoneme durations play a significant role in differentiating Hindi, Telugu and Tamil languages with regard to stop sounds, vowels and nasals.