Remarks on the duration of Lithuanian consonants in a continuous speech

ENAcoustical (quantitative) properties of consonants of Lithuanian standard language are still not extensively and properly covered by the contemporary research. The objective of this paper is to investigate quantity of consonants in a continuous speech of Standard Lithuanian, to qualify spontaneous duration of the analyzed sounds considering qualitative (articulatory) features and ignoring other factors like the length of the segment or the sound’s position in a word. The data used for the analysis – a fragment from a psychological novel „Altorių šešėly“ of V. Mykolaitis-Putinas read by the actor V. Širka. Speech corpus contained approximately 60.000 sounds. The quantity of consonants was measured after automatically annotating sound records on the phoneme level with the HTK speech recognition toolkit and subsequently manually correcting phone boundaries with the acoustic analysis program Praat. The results were processed statistically. The results show that the most significant and distinctive articulatory feature influencing duration is the manner of articulation and the voicing. The place of articulation and palatalization has no impact on the duration of the analyzed consonants.