Mahdi DurisIowa State University | ISU · Department of English
Mahdi Duris
Master of Arts
About
11
Publications
1,102
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Introduction
I’m a research assistant and Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics and Technology (ALT) at Iowa State University. My research interest is in pronunciation, phonetics, and phonology. Specifically, the automation of intelligibility ratings by way of the Acoustic Masking and Intelligibility (AMI) theory. I also conduct research on Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) systems.
Additional affiliations
Education
August 2020 - May 2025
August 2018 - May 2020
June 2013 - July 2013
University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Field of study
- Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
Publications
Publications (11)
It is commonly argued that lexical words receive prosodic prominence, whereas Non-Lexical Words (NLWs) are non-prominent in spoken discourse. Yet, emergent evidence from spoken corpora preliminarily suggested that this distinction might not be completely accurate as NLWs can be situationally informative and, therefore, assigned prominence. Using a...
This study presents an instrumental phonetic account of the intelligibility of Saudi Spoken English (SSE) consonants. Few studies have investigated the spoken consonants of highly proficient EFL teachers in Saudi Arabia. This research informs on how intelligible SSE consonants are perceived by General American English (GAE) listeners using the Koff...
This study presents an instrumental phonetic account of the intelligibility of Saudi Spoken English (SSE) consonants. Few studies have investigated the spoken consonants of highly proficient EFL teachers in Saudi Arabia. This research informs on how intelligible SSE consonants are perceived by General American English (GAE) listeners using the Koff...
Koffi (2019) investigated the acoustic correlates that Arabic L2 speakers of English use to encode
lexical stress. This study replicates the same methodology and uses the same acoustic correlates
and the same Just Noticeable Difference (JND) thresholds. Whereas Koffi (2019) focused on a
general population of Arabic speakers of English, the current...
Intelligibility of second language (L2) speakers is typically measured using dictation, transcription and/or listening comprehension exercises performed by native (L1) speakers (Kang, et al., 2017). However, Koffi’s (2019) Acoustic Masking and Intelligibility (AMI) theory implies that intelligibility of vowels can be measured instrumentally by exam...
This article describes the acoustic characteristics of female Saudi-accented English vowels and
uses acoustic phonetic measurements to assess the intelligibility of their vowels. Peterson &
Barney’s (1952) and Hillenbrand et al.’s (1995) methodology is slightly modified. Whereas their
studies extracted various measurements, including F1 and F2 of v...
This thesis serves two purposes. The first is to describe Saudi-accented English vowels
acoustically. The second is to rely on the measurements obtained from the acoustic phonetic
analyses to assess the intelligibility of their vowels. The methodology pioneered by Peterson and
Barney (1952) and replicated by Hillenbrand, Getty, Clark & Wheeler (199...
English is the main foreign language in schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Even though the Kingdom has made considerable budgetary sacrifices to raise English proficiency in the country, the results do not yet match expectations. According to English First (EF), in 2019, Saudi Arabia ranked “very low” on the English Proficiency Index (EPI). We...
This pilot study examined the strategies that speakers of American English employ in producing Arabic [ʔ]. We have measured, compared, and contrasted the VOT produced by English speakers to those of Arabic speakers. Background information A B [saʔala] [suʔaːl] [aʔkal] [qaɾaʔa] [ɾaʔs].