Acoustic Analysis of Accent-Specific Pronunciation Effect on Bangladeshi Bangla: A Study on Sylheti Accent

The speakers' variability caused by accent is one of the key elements that plays role for robust speech recognition. This study investigates accent related variations of acoustic characteristics of four monophthongal vowels of Bangladeshi Bangla language. The study considers four male speakers from Sylhet region, which has one of the highly deviant dialects in Bangla [1] and four male speakers from different districts of North-West and Middle Part of Bangladesh. An individual speaker's regional affiliation is reflected by his or her Accent. So, the correlations between these two groups of single-accent speakers of Bangla language have been studied by analysis of accent acoustic features such as fundamental frequency (pitch), formant frequencies and pitch slope. The results of the acoustic analysis indicate significant variation in formant frequencies and different steepness of rise or fall in pitch slope between these two group of speakers. Inclusion of this investigation will help categorize speakers' variability for building corpora for robust speech recognition in Bangla.