14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Acoustic Modeling of Tamil Retroflex Liquids

Shrikanth Narayanan (1), Abigail Kaun (2)

(1) AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA
(2) Linguistics Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Tamil dialects may contain as many as five contrastive liquids. This paper focuses on two of the more unusual of these liquids. The study uses MRI-derived vocal tract data in conjunction with an articulatory synthesizer to investigate articulatory-acoustic mappings in these sounds. The effects of varying constriction area, constriction location and side-cavity lengths are investigated. Simulation results show good correspondence between estimated and actual formant values.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Narayanan, Shrikanth / Kaun, Abigail (1999): "Acoustic modeling of Tamil retroflex liquids", In ICPhS-14, 2097-2100.