Recognition of English vowels in isolated speech using characteristics of Bengali accent

The speech of non-native speakers of a language is usually characterized by the presence of acoustic phonetic and phonological deviations from the norm. Research in this field has attempted to identify these deviations in order to characterize different accents. English language has been studied for many years both from the perspective of native and non-native accents. Non-native speakers´ speech may possess several acoustic-phonetic characteristics that are unusual in the native speakers´ speech. This paper is concerned with the effect of Bengali accent on English vowel recognition. It is seen that spectral characteristics of different English vowel sounds are largely influenced by the Bengali-accented speech. Formants´ nature of each vowel sound in Bengali accent differs from those of native accents. These findings are very effective to develop an English vowel recognizer that is capable to work successfully with Bengali-accented people. The recognition method applied here is very simple and the recognition accuracy is also very satisfactory.