Egyptian Arabic phonetic (segmental & supra-segmental) description

Responsible: Omnia Ibrahim, Dr. Homa Asadi
Duration of the project: September 2019 onwards

We are constructing an Arabic speech corpus in Egyptian dialect. The primary intention behind designing such corpus is to provide a homogenous dataset of Arabic speech recordings, which will be used to investigate broadly/narrowly the acoustic features of Egyptian Arabic dialect. The dataset follows principles of the protocol for the collection of databases of recordings for forensic-voice-comparison research and practice which was developed by Morrison, Rose and Zhang (2012) and also the collection procedures of BonnTempo corpus (Dellwo et al, 2004) which is one of the largest databases currently available for the study of speech rhythm measures in connection with speech rate. The following stage will be to explore the acoustic properties of Arabic rhythm through new promising measures which have been proposed to capture speech rhythm, amongst all the classic rhythm distinction between ‘stress-timing’ and ‘syllable- timing.

Partners: Prof. Dr. Mervat Fashal, Dr. Eman Kassem (Alexandria university)