R. Prasath and T. Kathirvalavakumar (Eds.): MIKE 2013, LNAI 8284, pp. 790–798, 2013. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013 L1 Bengali Phonological Interference on L2 English - Analysis of Bengali AESOP Corpus Shambhu Nath Saha and Shyamal Kr. Das Mandal Center for Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India shambhuju@gmail.com, sdasmandal@cet.iitkgp.ernet.in Abstract. Every language has its own phonemic system, which holds unique as well as common features. A language shares some phonemes with other lan- guages, but no two languages have the same phonemic inventory. Contrastive analysis is the field of study in which different phonemic systems are laid side by side to find out similarities and dissimilarities between the phonemes of the languages concerned. The purpose of this study is to derive which phonemes are used by the L1 Bengali speakers to recognize American English phonemes which are new and similar to their L1 Bengali phonology. The results of this study showed typical phonological problems of American English pronuncia- tion by L1 Bengali speakers which will help to develop Computer Assisted Spoken Language Learning (CASLL) tool for faster acquisition of American English language speaking of L1 Bengali speakers. Keywords: Contrastive analysis, Phonological interference, Language acquisition, Language transfer, Pronunciation, Phonemes, Phonology. 1 Introduction English is an international language for communication and its importance grows continuously day by day throughout the world. In large number of countries, English is studied and spoken as second language, so understanding the range of vari- ation present in the English spoken in the world today is fundamental issue for the development of English language education as well as spoken language science and technology. Asia is also an important market for English language education, and it is important to learn about Asian language speakers’ English and identify their features. Therefore, the Asian English Speech cOrpus Project (AESOP) was launched in order to construct a common shared large scale English speech corpus of Asian language speakers, and participating institutions in various Asian countries are collecting non- native (L2) English speech corpus of speakers of their official languages using the common recording platform [1]. Huge research in speech science is required to im- plement the linguistic finding into the development of language pedagogy for second language acquisition. Since India is a multilingual country we have so many variety of Indian English based on the local language and dialect. Combining native and