Acoustic Analysis of Native (L1) Bengali Speakers’ Phonological Realization of English Lexical Stress Contrast

Shambhu Nath Saha, Shyamal Kr. Das Mandal

Abstract
Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional and involving manipulation of duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel quality. The current study investigates the acquisition of English lexical stress by L1 Bengali speakers at the phonological level in terms of the properties of acoustic cues. For this purpose, this study compares 20 L1 Bengali speakers’ use of acoustic correlates for the production of English lexical stress in context sentence and neutral frame sentence. The result of this study showed that L1 Bengali speakers were not able to achieve neutral frame sentence like control over duration, intensity, F0 and to a limited extent vowel quality in context sentence. As a result, unlike neutral frame sentence, L1 Bengali speakers were not sensitive to English lexical stress contrast in context sentence. This analysis reveals that, the difference between the neutral frame and context sentences in terms of L1 Bengali speakers’ realization of phonology of English lexical stress contrast was probably due to the influence of Bengali phonology of lexical stress placement (restricted to the initial syllable of a word) on L1 Bengali speakers’ English speech.
Anthology ID:
2020.icon-main.46
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India
Venue:
ICON
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Publisher:
NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
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Pages:
341–348
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.icon-main.46
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Cite (ACL):
Shambhu Nath Saha and Shyamal Kr. Das Mandal. 2020. Acoustic Analysis of Native (L1) Bengali Speakers’ Phonological Realization of English Lexical Stress Contrast. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 341–348, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
Cite (Informal):
Acoustic Analysis of Native (L1) Bengali Speakers’ Phonological Realization of English Lexical Stress Contrast (Saha & Das Mandal, ICON 2020)
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