Emma's Project Update

After finishing recording speakers of five geographically distributed Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), I have been working on coming up with my dialect test. I selected five passages from each dialect, based on the following criteria:

1. It had to be easy to come up with a comprehension question
2. There had to be dialectal elements in the passage (preferably phonological, morphological, and lexical)
3. It had to be less than 40 words
4. Between the dialects, the frequencies of dialect elements (number of dialectal elements/number of words) should be similar. This was problematic because some passages were more "dialecty" than others, and the Lebanese and Egyptian samples seemed to have more dialectal elements than the others, mainly due to pronunciation differences. However, I tried.
   

Today, I clipped all of the audio from the recordings. My next steps will be to get this test online (audio, questions and all), get an expert opinion on it, and apply for the IRB.