LAUSR

The present study looks at Bangla, spoken near Kolkata, West Bengal, which has got the status of standard Bangla in present era, belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Vowel length distinction is not phonemic in Bangla. However, the impact of various prosodic positions and information structure is quite obvious on the phonetic duration of the vowel. This paper presents an acoustic study of the effect of Contrastive focus on the duration of the high vowels /i/ and /u/ in Bangla. Six monosyllabic and six disyllabic words with the target vowels, altogether 24 words have been recorded in both Contrastive focus and Neutral focus contexts. 24 sentences as response to yes-no questions and for Neutral focus, 24 simple declarative sentences were recorded from six speakers of Standard Kolkata Bangla between age group of 20-25. In Bangla, Focus is realized by low rising pitch pattern where the f0 movement have low f0 valley followed by a rise (Hayes and Lahiri 1991). The present study...