This study describes the prosodic and functional patterns of the particle tˤayb 2 in Spoken Saudi Arabic (SSA; the variety of Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia) through phonetic and conversational analysis. This particle, literally meaning "good/well/okay," is one of the most common spoken particles used in SSA. Data were collected by recording four hours of oral spontaneous speech produced by five Saudi speakers. The findings reveal that, structurally, the particle tˤayb can occur independently before questions and before negative and affirmative statements. Moreover, its meaning depends on its context and, sometimes, prosody. The particle is identified 109 times in the corpus, and consistently occupies an initial (i.e., turn-initial) but not a medial or final position. The results provide the pragmatic functions and the prosody of the particle tˤayb as well as the participants' use frequency of such functions. Tˤayb conveys nine pragmatic functions in the data, which are listed in order from the most frequent (i.e., turn-taking marker) to the least frequent use (i.e., request for patience). From a phonetic perspective, the results show different patterns in the production of the particle tˤayb; it may show an almost flat contour with medium length, as in the functions representing (turn-taking, change and close topic); a sharp rising/falling contour with medium length, particularly with the functions conveying (reproach and refusal); or a high contour that decreases gradually with long duration, as found in the particle marking Be patient or showing little/no importance.
The paper investigates the syllable structures of Qassimi Arabic (QA), which is a sub-dialect of Najdi Arabic (NA) and is spoken in the north-central region of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Qassim Region. Within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT), we show how the well-formed syllable is derived from the interaction of constraints. We show how the OT captures some of the major processes for structuring the syllables of QA, such as syncope, epenthesis, and geminate. The analysis revealed that onsetless syllables are prohibited in QA. The dialect allows word-initial consonant clusters, which is a result of the syncope process. Coda clusters also occur in QA that must obey the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP); otherwise, epenthesis presents to repair the violation. As for the geminates, QA permits geminates medially and finally, but not initially. The data revealed that QA demonstrates seven fundamental syllable structures grouped into three categories: light syllables, as in CV; heavy syllables, as in CVV and CVC; and super heavy syllables, as in CVVC, CVCC, CCVVC and CVVCC.
Research on native Arabic speakers' perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts has manifested various conclusions. Some studies have revealed that native Arabic speakers experience difficulty in the perception of non-native English phonemic contrasts, where others have concluded that they largely do not experience such difficulty. Due to this discrepancy, the current study aimed to examine the overall perceptual accuracy of only the English labial categories /p, b, f, and v/ in onset positions performed by native Arabic speakers. The study also examined the potential effects of the phonetic contexts and the familiarity of the stimuli being tested on the participants' perceptual performance. Twenty-four Saudi male participants completed consonantal phoneme identification and discrimination tasks. The findings revealed that the participants experienced difficulty in the perception of the categories /p/ and /v/, confusing them with their counterparts /b/ and /f/. The findings also revealed that neither phonetic context nor familiarity had any effect on the participants' perceptual accuracy of all of the categories in question, except in the context in which the category /v/ was followed by back vowels. In this specific context, the participants' performance tended to be lower, which could be attributed to the influence of lip rounding, which results in coarticulation with the fricative noise associated with this category (/v/). Lastly, the results obtained in this study provide additional crucial insights into auditory phonetics and present additional explanation on how the human auditory system recognizes speech sounds.
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