A Preliminary Study on the VOT Patterns of the Assamese Language and Its Nalbaria Variety

Abstract

The speech signal contains various analytical features and one such feature is the VOT or voice onset time which has proved to be a very important feature for classifying stops into different phonetic categories with respect to voicing. Furthermore in order to identify the features of digital speech and language for automatic recognition, synthesis and processing, it is important that the languages phoneme set is analyzed and VOT proves to be very useful in such an analysis. The stops in Assamese, the language spoken by the people of the state of Assam in North-East India, may be classified into three groups according to the place of articulation. They are labials, alveolars and velars. Historically the dental and retroflex stops have both merged into alveolar stops. Also for each group there are two different types based on the manner of voiced/ unvoiced distinction, i.e., aspirated and murmured. This paper focuses on computing and analyzing the VOT values for the stops of the Assamese language and its dialectal variants to provide a better understanding of the phonological differences that exist among the different dialectal variants of the language which may prove to be useful for dialect recognition, translation and synthesis.