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Sharifh Alqahtani

Doctoral Student in Linguistics - Sharifh’s thesis is entitled ‘The Interplay between Two L1 Arabic Varieties on the Acquisition of English’.

Research project title

The Interplay between Two L1 Arabic Varieties on the Acquisition of English

Supervisors

Professor Martha Young-Scholten, Dr Rory Turnbull and Dr Dan Duncan

Contact details

Email: s.alqahtani3@newcastle.ac.uk

Research interests

  • phonology
  • derivational phonology
  • optimality theory
a book in Arabic

A brief outline of the research project

This research aims to test the interplay between two Saudi Arabic varieties, Asiri Tihami dialect (ATD) and Modern Standard Arabic, and the pronunciation of English as a second language. Particularly, it focuses on investigating the phonological influence of each Saudi Arabic variety on the pronunciation of English speech errors.

Many theories will be used to compare and contrast the three languages such as contrastive analysis hypothesis (CAH) and language transfer theory (LTT) and find the effect of each varieties including stress patterns, segments. This will be conducted by giving descriptive Analysis of the Asiri Tihami Dialect first to get its sound inventory.  This will be done through interviewing native Tihami speakers from different age range. Then, the researcher will do formal and informal testing. The formal testing includes picture naming task, reading short English texts. Then the informal testing will include interviewing participants from this dialect. The English pronunciation errors will be classified as ATD, MSA including stress patterns, segments and stress.

Research activity

Conferences

March 2014, attended American Association for Applied Linguistics in Portland, Oregon

Academic background

  • MA Applied Linguistics, Southern Illinois University
  • BA in Languages and Translation, King Khalid University, Abba KSA