Speaker: Prof. P.N. Girija
         Unversity of Hyderabad
Title:  Duration in different types of Telugu sentences with various
        emotions/attitudes and
        Role of  Intonation  in Telugu emotional/attitudinal sentences

Duration is one of the required  main  features  to  develop  any  emotional
speech synthesis system. To explores the characteristic features  of  Telugu
the  duration  of  vowels  under  the  following  contexts   .The   phonetic
contrasts, intrinsic duration,  influence  of  adjacent  sounds,  positional
variation, syllable structure are considered for the  study.  Also  duration
variations   in   different   emotions   and   attitudes   of   declarative,
interrogative and imperative sentences have been studied.

Language is probably one of  the  most  important  tool  that  distinguishes
human beings from other animals and speech is the most important  medium  of
language. Speech sounds consists of segmental  and  non-segmental  features.
The non-segmental features  consists  of  paralinguistic  features  such  as
vocal effects and prosodic features. Under prosodic features the  intonation
features such as pitch, pitch level, pitch movement, pitch  range,  loudness
for different emotions/attitudes for different types of sentences have  been
studied.