A Contrastive-Acoustic Study of Arabic National and International Broadcasted Social-Program Speech

Abstract

The study aims to determine the variations in the acoustic properties, viz: the fundamental frequency, amplitude, intensity, and duration of time of social program’s utterances that are presented by the national and international announcers, taking into consideration spokesperson genders (male/female). It analyzes the acoustic parameters of Arabic national and international broadcasting speech in audio media. Twenty -four announcers produce the utterances. The researcher collects the data of the study from four main radio stations, two of them are national radio stations in Iraq, namely (Iraqi Media Network, which includes (The Republic of Iraq radio and Al-Iraqiya Radio), and Al-Mirbad radio, the other set comprises international radio stations, namely           (BBC Arabic and Monte Carlo Doualiya – MCD). The study hypothesizes that the national male/female broadcasters produced the social- program’s utterances with a remarkable variation of the acoustic properties, in contrast to the international male/female broadcasters’. Once the data are segmented, they are processed using the PRAAT acoustic analysis program (Boersma &Weenink, 2020). In this way, the researcher can measure the variations in the four acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency, amplitude, intensity, and duration of time of broadcasters’ utterances. Among the main findings of this study, the three corresponding utterances are uttered by the national male/female announcers with divers fundamental frequency, amplitude, intensity, and duration, in contrast with the other international male/female newscasters.