An Acoustic Description of Stop Consonants and Vowels in Sorani Kurdish and English

Abstract

This study aims to document and describe the speech sounds and sound inventory that are present in Sorani which is dialect of Kurdish and compare the results with their English counterparts.  The research concentrates on the voicing system and the quality of Sorani sounds which are measured by using the voice onset time (VOT) of the stop consonants, and the first three formants of the vowel sounds; the closure duration of voiceless stop consonants in medial position is measured as well.

Ten native speakers of the Sorani dialect (5 males and 5 females) participated in this experiment. All speakers are between 20 and 50 years of age, were born in Sulaimanyiah, migrated to the US, and remain in the US at the time of recording. Speakers have been recorded using a Marantz PMD671 digital recorder and an Electro-voice 671BL microphone. Recordings will take place in a quiet atmosphere, in order to eliminate interference from background noise. The English measurements are taken from some previous studies that depended on the same kind of measurement strategy.