Acoustic Analysis of Front Vowels /Ɛ/ and /æ/ in Pakistani Punjabi English

Abstract

The current research is done for the verification of two different claims. According to Kachru, (2005) that Punjabi English speakers are unable to create distinction between /Ɛ/ and /æ/ front vowels but Bilal et al. (2011) has refused this claim after verifying it in the speech of Punjabi speakers of Sargodha, Pakistan. If Bilal is right than there is a big need to study this claim in broader perspective. Therefore, in the current research, 9720 utterances (of 72 native Punjabi speakers from 12 districts of Punjab, Pakistan) are recorded and analyzed in PRAAT software. Data analysis is done in two steps i.e., (i) auditory analysis is done by listening wave files and (ii) acoustic analysis is based on the measurement of first three formant values (F1, F2, F3) and vowels’ duration. The results clarify that Pakistani Punjabi English speakers have maintained difference in short and long, stressed and unstressed articulation at word initial and medial positions. But the limited number of Lahori Punjabians could not maintain this difference at word medial position only. Consequently, this research highly supports Bilal’s claim in broader perspective but we cannot totally deny Kachru’s claim. Because we have also find traces of /Ɛ/ and /æ/ merger in our data as well and the reason might be the selection of research sample.

AudVowelConsNet: A phoneme-level based deep CNN architecture for clinical depression diagnosis

“…A sequence of speech sounds is organized in function of organization units called syllables, which are typically constituted of phoneme units, typically, vowel and consonant units (De Jong, 2003). Speech vowels and consonants duration is directly influenced by factors such as speaking rate, adjacent consonants, syllabic stress, position of a vowel in a word and the word type (Farooq and Mahmood, 2018). Consequently, speech vowels and consonants are directly affected in depressed speech.…”