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This paper is an acoustic phonetic study of vowels in Sora, a Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family. Descriptions here illustrate that the Sora vowel system has six vowels and provide evidence that Sora disyllables have prominence on the second syllable. While the acoustic categorization of vowels is based on formant frequencies, the presence of prominence on the second syllable is shown through temporal features of vowels, including duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency. Additionally, this paper demonstrates that acoustic categorization of vowels in Sora is better in the prominent syllable than in the non-prominent syllable, providing evidence that syllable prominence and vowel quality are correlated in Sora. These acoustic properties of Sora vowels are discussed in relation to the existing debates on vowels and patterns of syllable prominence in Munda languages of India. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Munda languages, in general, lack instrumental studies, and therefore this paper presents significant findings that are undocumented in other Munda languages. These acoustic studies are supported by exploratory statistical modeling and statistical classification methods.

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The objective of this work is to characterize the intervocalic glottal stops in Assam Sora. Assam Sora is a low resource language of the South Munda language family. Glottal stops are produced with gestures in the deep laryngeal level; hence, the estimated excitation source signal is used in this study to characterize the source dynamics during the production of Assam Sora glottal stops. From that, temporal domain voice source features, Quasi-Open Quotient (QOQ) and Normalized Amplitude Quotient (NAQ) are extracted along with spectral features such as H1-H2 ratio and Harmonic Richness Factor (HRF). One excitation source feature is extracted from the zero frequency filtered version of the speech signal to characterize the variations within the glottal cycles in glottal stop region. A recently proposed wavelet based voice source feature, Maxima Dispersion Quotient (MDQ) is also used to characterize the abrupt glottal closure during glottal stop production. From the analysis, it is observed that the features are salient enough to uniquely characterize glottal stops from the adjacent vowel sounds and may also be used in continuous speech. A Mann-Whitney U test confirmed the statistical significance of the differences between glottal stops and their adjacent vowels.