The structure of Hindi stop consonants.

The pronunciation of stop consonants varies markedly with age, gender, accent, etc. Yet by extracting appropriate cues common to these varying pronunciations, it is possible to correctly identify the spoken consonant. In this paper, the structure underlying Hindi stop consonants is presented. This understanding may potentially be used as a "recipe" for their artificial synthesis. Hindi alphabet stops were analyzed for this purpose. This alphabet has an organized and comprehensive inventory of stop consonants, and its consonants invariably terminate with the neutral vowel schwa. While the former consideration makes the findings potentially applicable to many languages including English, the latter rationale helped reduce the endeavor's analytical complexity. The alphabet has velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and bilabial stops in voiceless-unaspirated, voiceless-aspirated, voiced-unaspirated, voiced-aspirated, and nasal flavors. It is shown that additive combinations of relatively simple acoustic functions can be used to generate most of the 20 non-nasal stops. This work will potentially help speech therapists improve diagnosis and rectification of speech and hearing disabilities, speed up electronic communication of audio data, and improve voice recognition.