Syllabification in Moroccan Arabic: evidence from patterns of temporal stability in articulation

Abstract

Competing proposals on the syllabification of initial consonants in Moroccan Arabic are evaluated using a combination of experimental and modelling techniques. The proposed model interprets an input syllable structure as a set of articulatory landmarks coordinated in time. This enables the simulation of temporal patterns associated with the input syllable structure under different noise conditions. Patterns of stability between landmarks simulated by the model are matched to patterns in data collected with Electromagnetic Articulometry experiments. The results implicate a heterosyllabic parse of initial clusters so that strings like /sbu/ comprise two syllables, [s.bu]. Beyond this specific result for Moroccan Arabic, the model reveals the range of validity of certain stability-based indexes of syllable structure and generates predictions that allow evaluation of a syllabic parse even when stability-based heuristics break down. Overall, the paper provides support for the broad hypothesis that syllable structure is reflected in patterns of temporal stability and contributes analytical tools to evaluate competing theories on the basis of these patterns. * We would like to thank the editors of the special issue, Andries Coetzee, René Kager and Joe Pater, as well as Dani Byrd and one anonymous reviewer for comments that greatly improved the paper. Thanks are also due to the NYU ph-lab group, especially Tuuli Adams, Adam Buchwald, Lisa Davidson, Maria Gouskova and Kevin Roon for comments on this work at various stages of development. Parts of the data were first presented at the CUNY conference on the syllable. We'd like to thank participants at that conference for their feedback, particularly François Dell, Paul Kiparsky, Patricia Shaw and Donca Steriade. Remaining errors are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Dynamic invariance in the phonetic expression of syllable structure: a case study of Moroccan Arabic consonant clusters

“…2b a different pattern is found, whereby the centre to anchor interval is more stable across words than the left edge to anchor and right edge to anchor intervals. This pattern has been found repeatedly in languages claimed have complex syllable onsets (Browman & Goldstein 1988, Honorof & Browman 1995, Goldstein et al 2009, Marin & Pouplier 2010, but also, under some circumstances, in languages claimed to have simplex syllable onsets (Shaw et al 2009). As shown in Fig.…”

“…In contrast to other widely used indices of stability such as variance or standard deviation, relative standard deviation does not bias the interpretation of the results in favour of right edge to anchor stability (as the shortest of the three intervals shown in Fig. 2, the right edge to anchor interval is biased toward having a lower variance or standard deviation than the other intervals), making it a conservative measure for assessing phonological organisation using temporal stability measures (Shaw et al 2009). For all combinations of speaker and triad, the RSD of the right edge to anchor interval (Table Ic, in bold) was lower than the RSD of the other two intervals (Table Ia, b).…”

“…Three interval durations were measured for each token. These intervals correspond to those used to summarise timing patterns in related work (Browman & Goldstein 1988, Byrd 1995, Honorof & Browman 1995, Shaw et al 2009 In this section, the above intervals are used to evaluate the two competing hypotheses about temporal organisation schematised in Fig. 2.…”

Articulatory overlap as a function of voicing in French and German consonant clusters

“…This account needs to be substantiated with more data for French. It does find some support, however, from Moroccan Arabic which has voiced stop þ stop clusters in initial position and whose basic coordination pattern appears to be low overlap (Gafos et al, 2010;Shaw et al, 2009). A question left open by this account is, as one reviewer pointed out, how coordination patterns across words might be able to affect the typically highly constrained patterns of onset clusters.…”

Timing of German onset and word boundary clusters

“…Apart from these studies where both right-edge stability and C-center stability were found, there exist languages which seem to exhibit right-edge stability predominantly, such as Berber (Goldstein et al 2007;Hermes et al 2011) and Moroccan Arabic (Shaw et al 2009;Shaw et al 2011). In agreement with the phonological literature on Berber and Moroccan Arabic (Dell and Elmedlaoui 1996), these experimental studies provide converging evidence that these languages do not allow for more than a single consonant as part of the syllable onset (simplex onsets).…”