Comparative Acoustic-Phonetic Analysis of Retroflex Consonants of Some Indian Languages

摘要

Retroflexion is an important phonological category in many Indian languages. This paper puts forward an effort made to present the findings of acoustic characteristics of retroflex sounds that significantly describe and differentiate them from other sounds. The retroflex sounds /t/, /t~h/, /d/, /d~h/, /r/, /r~h/, /eta/, /s/ are acoustically analysed for three Indian languages i.e. Hindi, Nepali and Punjabi. Selected words containing each of these consonants in embedded in VCV positions were recorded by 50 native male and female speakers of each of these three languages. Parameters such as spectral properties of burst, formant transition(shifts), duration etc. were analysed. It has been observed that the formants F2, F3and F4 of the burst and adjoining transitions, particularly the rising of F2 and falling of F3, F4 are significant. The minimal differences between F2 and F3 values, strong release of burst, shorter duration of silence and VOTs are noteworthy. The retroflex sounds /r/ and /r~h/ which appear in medial and final positions of any word are mostly heard as rhetoric /r/. Some of the linguistic differences observed include /η/ pronounced as /n/ and /r/ as /r/ in Nepali whereas /r~h/ pronounced as /d~h/ in Punjabi.