Analysis of Stop Consonants and Vowels in Indian Languages: A Multifractal Approach

Abstract

The work presented in this paper analyse the stop consonants and vowels in Indian language from a novel perspective. In the context of many Indian languages, the combination of these sounds, consonant-vowel (CV), forms an important subset of alphabets. These sounds are characterized by their place of articulation and manner of articulation. Most of the previous works in the analysis of manner of articulation, for a given place of articulation, focused on the excitation source features and events such as voicing onset time, based on linear source-filter theory. In this study, we solve the problem from a nonlinear perspective by analysing the fractal nature of isolated vowels and stop consonants. Experimental result shows that the multifractal approach is very effective in identifying the fluctuations in the speech sounds. The result also shows that the spectral width computed from multifractal analysis distinguishes the four categories of manner of articulation in stop sounds.