Bengali speech : Formant structures of single vowels and initial vowels of words

An experimental study on the formant structure of Bengali vowels uttered both in isolation and in the beginning of words has been investigated for the first time. The extraction of formant frequencies were carried out using the analysis by synthesis (AbS) method. It has been found that the formant structures of Bengali vowels uttered in isolation differ considerabely with those for English and the Japanese vowels though their sounds are alike. It has also been found that unlike the case of English and Japanese, the isolated Bengali vowels form two distinct group upon the F1-F2 plane. The effect of succeeding phonemes on the formant frequency of initial vowel of a word have also been investigated and discussed.