ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH VOWEL SOUNDS PRODUCED BY SINDHI SPEAKERS

Abstract

The present study examines the English vowel production of Sindhi speakers acoustically. This study spotlights Sindhi speakers from two geographical locations in Pakistan: Hyderabad and Islamabad. Despite sharing vowel types, there is disparity between English and Sindhi vowel sound articulation. The PRAAT software (Boersma & Weenink, 2019) was used to analyze English vowels' duration and quality produced by the speakers. For this, a monosyllabic wordlist for ten vowel sounds with CVC structure in ‘hVd ‘context within a carrier sentence was recorded from twenty-six Sindhi speakers.The findings of this study reveal that Sindhi speakers, in terms of vowel quality, lack the realization of clear contrast between the English vowel pairs. Whereas, English front vowels; /e/, /æ/, and /ε/ are almost produced similarly. All vowels were classified as short or long in terms of length but not enough contrast was found in all pairs of vowels except /iː/-/ɪ/. The findings of this study would help English language teachers to follow the acousticphonetic aspects of language while teaching pronunciation to second language learners and to develop artificial speech systems and speech recognizers based on Sindhi speakers’ English use.