Phonetic and phonological interference of English pronunciation by native Bengali (L1-Bengali,L2-English) speakers

Abstract

Due to the importance of English grows day by day, it is necessary to acquire English language properly for second language learner where proper acquisition involves in correct pronunciation. Forty native (L1) Bengali speakers' read speech data of “The North Wind and the Sun” was analyzed to find out the phonetic and phonological problems of L1 Bengali speakers' English speech. During the study automatic phoneme alignment was carried out by the HTK tool with a modified TIMIT dictionary. The result shows that L1 Bengali speakers substitute new English consonant and vowel phonemes by Bengali sounds which are close to those English sounds. In case of phonological problem, it was observed that vowels are inserted by L1 Bengali speakers to break up consonant clusters or avoid syllable final coda consonant. The effect of fluency on phonetic and phonological problems of L1 Bengali speakers was also presented in the paper.