Sound and syllable distribution in written kannada and their application to speech and hearing

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to compute the distribution of sounds and syllables in written Kannada. Simple frequency counts of
different sounds (letters) and syllables were made from an analysis of more than 1 lakh words. The written material selected were news papers
and popular magazines. The analysis showed the occurrence of 896 different syllables in Kannada with varying frequency of occurrence. The
potential application of these statistics to (1) Communication engineering and (2) in the assesment, diagnosis, research and rehabilitation of individuals
with speech, hearing and language pathology has been enumerated in the last section of the paper.