Bilingual acoustic voice variation: the case of Sorani Kurdish-Persian speakers

Abstract

Many individuals around the world speak two or more than two languages. This phenomenon adds a fascinating dimension of variability to speech, both in perception and production. But do bilinguals change their voice when they switch from one language to the other? It is typically assumed that while some aspects of the speech signal vary for linguistic reasons, some indexical features remain unchanged across languages. Yet little is known about the influence of language on within- and between-speaker vocal variability. The present study investigated how acoustic parameters of voice quality are structured in two languages of a bilingual speaker and to what extent such features may vary between bilingual speakers. For this purpose, speech samples of 10 simultaneous Sorani Kurdish-Persian bilingual speakers were acoustically analyzed. Following a psychoacoustic model proposed by Kreiman (2014) and using a series of principal component analyses, we found that Sorani Kurdish-Persian bilingual speakers followed a similar acoustic pattern in their two different languages, suggesting that each speaker has a unique voice but uses the same voice parameters when switching from one language to the other.