PHONETIC INFLUENCE ON NATIVE BENGALI

SPEAKERS’ ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION – ANALYZED

BY AUTOMATIC ANNOTATION BASED ON HTK
Shambhu Nath Saha, Shyamal Kr. Das Mandal
Center for Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
shambhuju@gmail.com, sdasmandal@cet.iitkgp.ernet.in

Abstract: English is used as a language for international communication throughout the world today.
English is also being studied and spoken as a second language in more countries than ever before. Thus,
a comprehensive understanding of variations present in the dialects of English spoken in the world today
is a fundamental issue for the development of English language education as well as spoken language
science and technology. This paper reported the detail investigation of phonetic influence of native (L1)
Bengali speakers’ English compared to American English. For this study, 40 L1 Bengali speakers’ read
speech data in English was analyzed based on automatic annotation by the HTK tool with a modified
TIMIT dictionary. The result shows that L1 Bengali speakers could pronounce same and similar
American English consonant phonemes without any difficulty, but they replaced new English consonant
and vowel phonemes by Bengali phonemes which are close to those English phonemes.

Keywords- LI Bengali, L2 English, automatic alignment, HTK, TIMIT

1. Introduction
English is an international language for communication and it has growing importance as a second
language for spoken and written. The blending of English with local languages and dialects has given rise
to a wide variety of world English’s, which exhibit rich variation in pronunciation, lexicon and grammar.
So understanding the range of variation present in the English spoken in the world today is fundamental
issue for the development of English language education as well as spoken language science and
technology. Pronunciation is one of the most important factors of second language learning which
involves in production of correct sound in target language and production of sounds to make meanings. It
is the combination of sound segments to express a message in any given language. Each segment unit in
pronunciation is playing a vital role in daily interaction in English language. Moreover language structure,
stress, rhythm influence the pronunciation in English language. Asia is home to the largest number of
English learners and speakers in the world, and it is important to learn about Asian language speakers’
English and identify their features [1]. In India, combining native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers, more
people speak or understand English than any other country in the world [2]. Thus research on spoken
English of Indian speakers from a multidisciplinary perspective is urgently needed. Like other Eastern
Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali arose from eastern Middle Indo-Aryan dialects of Magadhi Prakrit and
Pali. It is the official state language of the Eastern Indian state of West Bengal and the national language
of Bangladesh. The present study is based on the official dialect of West Bengal, i.e., Standard Colloquial
Bengali (SCB) [3]. American English has fifteen vowels, where Bengali has a seven vowel system
(excluding nasal vowels). On the other hand, American English has twenty two consonant phonemes [4],
whereas Bengali has thirty one consonant phonemes [5]. Therefore American English has a much larger
vowel system than Bengali, but Bengali has more consonant phonemes than American English. L1 plays
a vital role in the formation of the L2 pronunciation, and that a contrastive analysis of the L1 and L2 is a
valid means of describing areas of pronunciation difficulties.
 The contrastive analysis implies that there are three relationships that phonemes of L1 and L2
languages can have [6]; English phoneme can be the same as, similar to or different from Bengali
phoneme. As per IPA notation of Bengali and American English, it was observed that American English
consonant phonemes /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/, /m/, /ŋ/, /s/, /ʃ/, /h/ are same and the consonant
phonemes /n/, /l/, /r/ are similar and consonant phonemes /f/, /v/, /θ/, /ð/, /z/, /ʒ/ are new to L1 Bengali
speakers. From the theory of second language acquisition, it is well known that L2 speakers can easily
acquire same phonemes, but similar and new phonemes are difficult for them to acquire [7]. So L2
speakers are likely to replace new as well as similar phonemes of L2 language by their L1 phonemes
which are close to those L2 phonemes, results in interference on phonetic level. L1 Bengali speakers have
difficulties to produce certain English consonant and vowel phonemes and tendency to replace them by
their L1 phonemes, results in incorrect pronunciation. Bengali phonology is quite different from English
phonology both segmentally and prosodically. Effect of L1 phonology on L2 phonology is called
phonological interference. L1 Bengali speakers’ English pronunciation is different from that of L1
English speakers due to this phonological interference also. In the present study, we dissociate the
question of English pronunciation difficulties due to phonological interference, and focus on the L1
Bengali speakers’ English pronunciation difficulties due to the phonetic interference. Objective of this
study is to analyze new, same, and similar American English consonant as well as vowel phonemes
realization by L1 Bengali speakers in order to find out phonetic variations in L1 Bengali speakers’
English pronunciation compared to American English.

2. Speech Material
The material used for the present study was the AESOP's fable "The North Wind and the Sun" [8],
which produces a large range of segmental and suprasegmental characteristics in English. This
phonetically balanced passage is recommended by the IPA, which contains 144 syllables, 113 words, 8
independent clauses, 5 dependent clauses, 5 sentences, 3 paragraphs and all English phonemes. The
material was read by 40 (20 male, 20 female) L2 (Ll Bengali) English speakers, where all speakers were
in the age group between 20 to 35 years and had studied English as a second language for a minimum of
ten years. In the present study, participants were originally from Kolkata in West Bengal and had either
completed school level education or undergraduate degree studies or were continuing their postgraduate
studies. The speech was recorded by using AESOP's recording tool kit with AESOP's specified recording
platform. For the fluency of reading, the speakers were instructed to read out the text several times before
recording and read the material aloud. The speech was digitized at a sampling rate 16 kHz with an
accuracy of 16 bits/sample.

3. Methodology
Out of 40 L1 Bengali speakers’ English speech, 10 L1 Bengali speakers’ English speech data was
randomly selected for manual analysis. Every phoneme in 10 L1 Bengali speakers’ English speech
waveforms was compared manually using spectral and auditory evaluation with the corresponding
phoneme in L1 American English pronunciation derived from TIMIT dictionary. If phonemes were
matched then the phoneme was not replaced by L1 Bengali speaker. If it was not matched, results in
pronunciation difference and then replaced phoneme was identified. Finally number of substitution for
each phoneme was counted which represents the total number of pronunciation variations of that
phoneme. It was observed from the manual analysis that there were no segmental and auditory differences
between Bengali English and American English for the same phonemes given in Table 1; this means that
same phonemes were not replaced by L1 Bengali speakers in their English speech.
Table 1. Phonemic similarities between L1 and L2 (L1 Bengali) English.

Phonemes /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/, /m/, /ŋ/, /s/, /ʃ/, /h/
There was a slight intensity difference in higher formants (i.e. F3, F4 and above) for the phonemes /n/, /l/,
/r/ between Bengali English and American English. At higher formants, intensity of /n/, /1/, /r/ in
American English was comparatively higher than that of Bengali English. Results from manual analysis
indicated that Bengali speakers have no problems with same and similar American English consonant
phonemes, but have problems with new American English consonant as well as vowel phonemes and
substitute new English consonant and vowel phonemes (as in Table 2) by Bengali sounds which are close
to those English sounds. But number of speakers was not sufficient to conclude a decision; so more
number of speakers was required to analyze. For large number of speakers, it is difficult to analyze speech
corpus manually. So L2 (Ll Bengali) English speech corpus was analyzed by automatic phoneme
alignment using Hidden Markov Model Tool Kit (HTK) module.
Table 2. Substitution of American English phonemes by L1 Bengali speakers.

English Substituted by English Substituted by

Phoneme Bengali Phoneme Phoneme Bengali Phoneme
/f/ /ph/ /e/, /ɛ/ /e/
/v/ /bh/ /u:/, /ʊ/ /u/
/θ/ /th/ /æ/ /æ/
/ð/ /ɖ/ /ɔ:/ /ɔ/
/z/, /ʒ/ /ʤ/ /o/ /o/
/ə/, /ɚ/,/ɝ/,
/i:/, /I/ /i/ /a/
/a/, /ɑ:/, /ʌ/

HMM-based acoustic model was trained using 2000 sentence utterances of 200 L1 American English
speakers, which were collected from TIMIT speech corpus, with following parameters - Topology:
Mono-phone, 3 state and Left-to-Right type; Acoustic characteristics: 13 MFCC coefficients along with
13 delta and 13 delta-delta values. The word dictionary file that was used is based on the TIMIT speech
corpus and written with ARPABET is known as TIMIT dictionary. This trained HTK module with TIMIT
dictionary was developed to annotate L1 English speakers’ utterances with standard American accent and
is not suitable to annotate Bengali accented English, because L1 Bengali speakers’ English is very
different from L1 American English speakers’ utterances in terms of segmental and prosodic information.
Therefore, a new pronunciation dictionary reflecting Bengali accented English was added to the modules.
The new pronunciation dictionary lists all predicted phoneme sequences produced by Bengali speakers
(result of manual investigation) written with ARPABET [9] and newly defined symbols. The newly
defined symbols were used for all Bengali vowel phonemes and Bengali consonant phonemes that were
appeared in L1 Bengali speakers’ English speech (found from manual analysis). Table 3 shows the newly
defined symbols and associated Bengali phonemes.
Table 3. Bengali phonemes and their newly defined symbols.
Phoneme Newly Defined Symbol Phoneme Newly Defined Symbol
/ɖ/ da /æ/ ea
/ph/ ph /ɔ/ oa
/th/ ht /e/ ee
/kh/ kh /i/ ii
/bh/ bh /u/ wu
/a/ au /o/ wo
Table 4 shows an example of new pronunciation dictionary reflecting Bengali accented English for words
‘fold’ and ‘the’ from AESOP’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun”.
Table 4. Examples of new pronunciation dictionary for the words ‘fold’ and ‘the’.

Predicted Phonetic Transcription in ARPABET

Speakers
Pronunciation in IPA and Newly Defined Symbol
L1 English /f o l d/ f ow l d
/f o l d/ f wo l d
L1 Bengali /ph o l d/ ph ow l d
/ph o l d/ ph wo l d
L1 English /ð ə/ dh ax
/ɖ a/ da au
/ɖ ɔ/ da oa
L1 Bengali
/ ð i/ dh ii
/ɖ i/ da ii

In order to detect Bengali phonemes that appeared in Bengali accented English speech of L1 Bengali
speakers, HMM definition of Bengali phonemes are included to the trained HTK module based on TIMIT
speech corpus [10]. Accuracy of this automatic annotation with new pronunciation dictionary was
examined manually for 10 Ll Bengali speakers' data and it depicted accurately 82% of predicted English
pronunciation patterns of Bengali speakers. However remaining 18% cases the HTK tool kit based
automatic alignment was erroneous, in that case manual intervention is required. Finally phoneme
alignment of Bengali accented English speech of 40 L1 Bengali speakers were obtained by automatic
annotation using this trained HTK module with the new pronunciation dictionary file and TIMIT
dictionary file respectively. Then compare the two versions of phonetic transcription for each L1 Bengali
speaker’s English speech data, and count the number of replacement for each replaced American English
phoneme and identify the phoneme to be used for replacement.

4. Results and Discussions

4.1. Consonants
A total of 5,607 examples of variants of both vowels and consonants were found for 40 L1 Bengali
speakers from the analysis of HTK based phoneme alignment. Out of 5,687 variations, 1,439 variations
were for new consonant phonemes in the analyzed data. There were 144 examples out of 200 examples,
where /f/ was replaced by /ph/ by L1 Bengali speakers in their English speech and remaining 56 examples,
/f/ was not replaced. Since number of substitution of /f/ by /ph/ was higher than the number of not
substitution of /f/ (remain same), so the L1 Bengali speakers realized /f/ as Bengali phoneme /p h/. Out of
240 examples, there were 172 examples where /v/ was replaced by /bh/ by L1 Bengali speakers in their
English speech and remaining 68 examples, /v/ was not replaced. Since number of substitution of /v/ by
/bh/ was higher than the number of not substitution of /v/, so the L1 Bengali speakers realized /v/ as
Bengali phoneme /bh/. In case of /θ/, there were 121 examples out of 160 examples, where /θ/ was
replaced by /th/, and remaining 39 examples, /θ/ was not replaced. This result indicates that L1 Bengali
speakers realized /θ/ as /th/. Out of 1000 examples, 706 examples of /ð/ were replaced by /ɖ/ by L1
Bengali speakers in their English speech and remaining 294 examples, /ð/ was not replaced. Since number
of substitution of /ð/ by /ɖ/ was higher than the number of not substitution of / ð/, so the L1 Bengali
speakers realized /ð/ as Bengali phoneme /ɖ/. Out of 360 examples, 268 examples of /z/ were replaced by
/ʤ/ and remaining 92 examples, /z/ was not replaced by L1 Bengali speakers in their English speech.
This result indicates that L1 Bengali speakers realized /z/ as Bengali phoneme /ʤ/. In case of phoneme
/ʒ/, out of 40 examples, 28 examples of /ʒ/ were replaced by Bengali phoneme /ʤ/ and remaining 12
examples, /ʒ/ was not replaced. Hence L1 Bengali speakers realized /ʒ/ as Bengali phoneme /ʤ/. From
the result of analysis on consonants based on automatic phoneme alignment, it is observed that American
English consonant phonemes, which are difficult to produce (new consonant phonemes) by L1 Bengali
speakers, were substituted by Bengali consonant phonemes which are close to those English phonemes;
but same and similar American English consonant phonemes were not substituted by L1 Bengali
speakers.

4.2 Vowels
There were 4,168 examples of vowel variants, which were obtained from the analysis of HTK based
phoneme alignment, were identified as different from American standard pronunciation. Table 5 shows
the result of analysis of American English vowel phoneme realization by L1 Bengali speakers. In this
analysis a Bengali vowel phoneme, which was used maximum number of times to replace a particular
vowel phoneme of American English by L1 Bengali speakers, was recognized as replacement phoneme of
that vowel phoneme of American English. As for example, it is observed that vowel shwa (/ə/) had the
number of replacement with 1160 examples (574+183+243+99+6+22+33) out of 1400 examples and
remaining 240 examples /ə/ was not replaced. Various vowels were used to substitute /ə/, where
maximum number of times /ə/ was substituted by Bengali /a/ (574 times out of 1160 examples). Hence L1
Bengali speakers realized /ə/ as Bengali phoneme /a/.

Table 5. Result of analysis of American English vowels based on automatic phoneme alignment.
Number of
L1 Bengali Speakers’ Pronunciation Realized as
English Occurrence in
Bengali
Phoneme 40 L1 Bengali Substituted by Bengali Pronounced as English
Phoneme
Speakers’ Data Phoneme [Number] Phoneme [Number]
/i:/ 400 /i/ [278] /i:/ [122]
/i/
/I/ 720 /i/ [505] / I / [215]
/e/ 240 /e/ [153] /e/ [87]
/e/
/ɛ/ 160 /e/ [104] /ɛ/ [56]
/æ/ 640 /æ/ [398], /a/ [29] /æ/ [213] /æ/
/u:/ 280 /u/ [191], /o/ [2] /u:/ [87]
/u/
/ʊ/ 120 /u/ [83] /ʊ/ [37]
/ɑ:/ 40 /a/ [23], /ɔ/ [9] /ɑ:/ [8]
/a/ 120 /a/ [70], /ɔ/ [20] /a/ [30]
/a/ [574], /ɔ/ [183],
/ə/ 1400 /ə/ [240]
/i/ [243], /e/ [99], /u/ [6],
/a/
/o/ [22], /æ/ [33]
/ɚ/ 360 /a/ [241], /æ/ [6], /ɔ/ [35] /ɚ/ [78]
/ɝ/ 80 /a/ [56], /ɔ/ [4], /æ/ [3] /ɝ/ [17]
/ʌ/ 280 /a/ [184], /ɔ/ [31] /ʌ/ [65]
 /ɔ:/ 560 /ɔ/ [388] /ɔ:/ [172] /ɔ/
/o/ 320 /o/ [178], /u/ [17] /o/ [125] /o/

From the result of analysis (as shown in Table 5) on American English vowels using HTK based
phoneme alignment, it is observed that L1 Bengali speakers categorized American English vowel
phonemes into seven Bengali vowel phonemes. Therefore these results obtained from analysis of
automatic phoneme alignment related to consonant replacement and vowel categorization by L1 Bengali
speakers validate the results obtained from manual analysis (as in Table 2). From these results, it appears
that the L1 Bengali speakers had difficulties in production of new American English consonant and
American English vowel phonemes.

5. Conclusions
The analysis of L1 Bengali speakers’ read speech data of “The North Wind and the Sun” by automatic
alignment using newly defined HTK tool revealed most of the typical phonetic difficulties of English
pronunciation by L1 Bengali speakers.The results from HTK based analysis suggest that L1 Bengali
speakers can acquire same and similar American English consonant phonemes, but have difficulties in
production of new consonat as well as vowel phonemes of American English; hence L1 Bengali speakers
substitute new English consonant and vowel phonemes by Bengali sounds which are close to those
English sounds. The new alignment method using HTK tool was able to detect pronunciation variations
of Bengali speakers’ English and consequently was able to perform more accurate automatic alignment
compared to TIMIT based HTK module. Moreover the HTK with newly defined dictionary (reflecting
Bengali accented English) was able to detect fine differences in pronunciation and therefore better shows
features of Bengali speakers’ English. But newly defined HTK module has few problemes. It is adapted
from TIMIT based HTK module, as a result some typical Bengali phonological rules related to allophonic
variations caused by assimilation, elision are not included in the word dictionary file and so the new HTK
module can not detect these sounds when L1 Bengali speakers produce them in their English utterence.
However the study shows the potential for the HTK with newly defined dictionary to be used for
automatic alighnment to Bengali accented English speech. But experiment needs more samples and
subjects, and also need to be discussed in more detail in the future study. The present work is done on
read speech only. However the work will be done on conversational speech or lecture mode speech in
future. This study will help to assist the development of Computer Assisted Spoken Language Learning
(CASLL) tool for faster acquisition of English language speaking of L1 Bengali speakers in future.

6. References
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