Empirical Analysis of Phonological and Prosodic Features of Native and Non-Native Hindi Speakers
Shambhu Sharan, Shweta A. Bansal, Poonam Bansal, Amita Dev, Shyam Sunder Agrawal · 2023
When speaking a non-native language, an individual’s accent traits are constantly impacted by the native accent. In this paper, we give a preliminary investigation and comparison of phonological and acoustical features of Hindi speech uttered by native and non-native speakers. The speakers belonging to Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Kannada, Telugu and Assamese linguistic background whose second language is Hindi have been considered for the analysis. A perception test followed by acoustic analysis is done and the differences in both phonemic and prosodic features of Hindi spoken by non-native speakers have been compared based on their perseverance by Hindi speakers. Most of the languages of India have a prima facie co-relationship between their sounds and written form. The similarities in text-to-sound rule sets between various languages are not always true. We show such disparities and highlight issue areas where speech scientists should pay more attention when developing systems, particularly Indian language based multilingual systems.