Geminate timing in Lebanese Arabic: the relationship between phonetic timing and phonological structure

Abstract

This study investigates medial gemination patterns in Lebanese Arabic (LA). It offers an account of the duration patterns of quantity distinction for vowels and consonants in LA by using the most comprehensive dataset for this variety, and for Arabic in general, so far in terms of the number of speakers (20), the consonant types examined (24), the inspection of vowels preceding and following the consonant in durational analyses, and the inclusion of male and female speakers. The main aim is to show correspondence between phonetic timing in LA and phonological accounts of syllabic structure that are based on moraic weight (Hayes 1989;Broselow 1995;McCarthy and Prince 1995). The study extends predictions of mora-sharing in disyllables with medial clusters that are preceded by a long vowel (e.g., /ˈmaal.ħa/ 'salty-FEM-SG') to comparable syllables with a medial geminate (e.g., /ˈmaal.la/ 'bored-FEM-SG'), which have not been investigated in Arabic before. It shows that vowel shortening preceding medial geminates affects phonologically long but not short vowels, downplaying the commonly referred to closed-syllable shortening effect as the main reason for this phenomenon (Maddieson 1997). Instead, an account based on the interface between phonetic and phonological effects on compensatory vowel shortening offers better predictions.

Acoustic cue weighting in the singleton vs geminate contrast in Lebanese Arabic: The case of fricative consonants

“…I) and (the same patterns are observed for relative duration, whereby the geminate consonant contributes to almost 50% of the duration of the whole VCV syllable, see Khattab and Al-Tamimi, 2014). Our results on the preceding vowel are in accordance with previous results that show temporal compensation in the geminate environment only in the long vowel context, although the difference is below the just noticeable difference (JND) in duration discrimination (see, e.g., Stevens, 1998, pp.…”

“…Studies on gemination in Arabic are relatively scarce and tend to include very few subjects (e.g., Ham, 2001;Hassan, 2003;Nasr, 1960). In these and our own previous studies (e.g., Al-Tamimi and Khattab, 2011;Khattab, 2007;Khattab and Al-Tamimi, 2014) durational differences have been reported to significantly distinguish between singleton and geminate consonants in Arabic, however, we are not aware of any study that has researched non-temporal patterns in the implementation of this contrast in Arabic and their potential contribution to the acoustic basis of the contrast. This is interesting given that the Arabic term for gemination, /taSdi+d/, literally means "strengthening," "intensification," or "reinforcement."…”

“…These results suggest that the singleton vs geminate contrast in LA is mainly temporal, with secondary acoustic cues leading to a lax vs tense (lenis vs fortis) distinction. The primacy of the temporal domain for geminates in LA is explored elsewhere (Khattab and Al-Tamimi, 2014), where we have shown that a moraic account best explains the durational implementation of consonants and preceding vowels in singleton and geminate environments in LA. Moraic segments show greater durational stability than nonmoraic ones (Ham, 2001), and this applies to both geminate consonants and their surrounding vowels, which show no temporal compensation unless the resulting syllable is trimoraic (in the context of a long vowel followed by a geminate).…”

“…The total number of words produced by the speakers was 5171. A subset of the corpus dealing with fricative consonants is presented here, and the remaining results are presented elsewhere (e.g., Al-Tamimi and Khattab, 2011;Khattab and Al-Tamimi, 2014). The decision to focus on fricatives was made because they constitute the largest category in the LA consonant inventory (10 out of the 24 consonants, covering most places of articulation.…”

“…The majority of studies have shown that consonant duration is a major acoustic cue to the singleton vs geminate contrast [e.g., Al-Tamimi and Khattab (2011) and Khattab and Al-Tamimi (2014) on Lebanese Arabic; Arvaniti and Tserdanelis (2000) and Tserdanelis and Arvaniti (2001) on Cypriot Greek; Esposito and di Benedetto (1999) on Italian; Ham (2001) on Bernese, Levantine Arabic, Hungarian, and Madurese; Hansen (2004) on Persian; Hassan (2003) on Iraqi Arabic; Idemaru and Guion (2008) on Japanese; Lahiri and Hankamer (1988) Studies of the preceding vowel's duration have yielded conflicting results. Some studies show the vowel preceding the geminate consonant to be shorter (Esposito and di Benedetto, 1999;Ham, 2001;Ridouane, 2007), while others have found the reverse pattern (Hansen, 2004;Hassan, 2003;Idemaru and Guion, 2008;Lahiri and Hankamer, 1988;Tserdanelis and Arvaniti, 2001).…”