The Voicing Contrast in Stops and Affricates in the Western Armenian of Lebanon

Abstract

Research on Western Armenian has described it as having a contrast between voiceless aspirated stops and affricates, and voiced stops and affricates [1, 2]. The variety of Western Armenian spoken by a large population in Lebanon has not yet been examined phonetically, to determine the acoustic correlates of this contrast. The current study examines the alveolar and postalveolar affricates and alveolar stops (voiceless aspirated and voiced) in both word-initial and word-medial position, using nonsense words written in the Armenian script. The results indicate that voiced sounds have prevoicing, voiceless affricates have some aspiration, but voiceless stops have very short VOT, which aligns better with an analysis of them being classified as unaspirated. It was also found that position in the word does not affect VOT, duration of the closure or frication.

Voicing patterns in stops among heritage speakers of Western Armenian in Lebanon and the US

“…As expected, voiced stops had voicing during the closure, meaning they are truly voiced. Voiceless stops were predicted to be aspirated if they were following previous phonological descriptions of WA (Fairbanks 1948;Vaux 1998;Baronian 2017), or unaspirated, if there is an effect of the majority language (Kelly & Keshishian 2019). The average VOT for voiceless stops was 20.6 msec, with aspiration of 14.5 msec.…”

“…In another recent study on the acoustics of the three-way stop contrast in EA, Seyfarth & Garellek (2018) found that VOT and aspiration were significantly different among all three categories. Examining stops and affricates in nonce words produced by speakers of WA in Lebanon, Kelly & Keshishian (2019) found an Arabic-like pattern of a contrast between voiced obstruents and voiceless unaspirated obstruents. This suggests an effect of the majority language on the variety of WA spoken in Lebanon.…”

“…No research has examined the phonetic realization of the WA voicing contrast, except the study of nonce words (Kelly & Keshishian 2019). The current study expands on this by focusing only on stops and by including real words.…”

Armenian (Yerevan Eastern Armenian and Beirut Western Armenian)

“…Among speakers of Western Armenian in Lebanon, the plosive voicing contrast is between voiceless unaspirated and voiced plosives (Kelly & Keshishian 2019; Tahtadjian 2021). This pattern corresponds to what has been described for Lebanese Arabic stops (Bellem 2014; Al-Tamimi & Khattab 2018).…”

“…This pattern corresponds to what has been described for Lebanese Arabic stops (Bellem 2014; Al-Tamimi & Khattab 2018). As Lebanese Arabic was the most dominant non-Armenian language for the speakers in Kelly & Keshishian 2019 and Tahtadjian 2021, it is possible that the phonetic contrast used by these speakers is influenced by their multilingualism.…”