Acoustics and articulation of medial versus final coronal stop gemination contrasts in Moroccan Arabic

This paper presents results of a simultaneous acoustic and articulatory investigation of word-medial and word-final geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Moroccan Arabic (MA). The acoustic analysis revealed that, only for the wordmedial contrast, the two MA speakers adopted comparable strategies in contrasting geminates with singletons, mainly by significantly lengthening closure duration in geminates, relative to singletons. In word-final position, two speakerspecific contrasting patterns emerged. While one speaker also lengthened the closure duration for final geminates, the other speaker instead lengthened only the release duration for final geminates, relative to singletons. Consonant closure and preceding vowel were significantly longer for the geminate only in medial position, not in final position. These temporal differences were even more clearly delineated in the articulatory signal, captured via ultrasound, to which we applied the novel approach of using TRACTUS [Temporally Resolved Articulatory Configuration Tracking of UltraSound: 15] to index temporal properties of closure gestures for these geminate/singleton contrasts

Acoustics and articulation of medial versus final coronal stop gemination contrasts in Moroccan Arabic

This paper presents results of a simultaneous acoustic and articulatory investigation of word-medial and word-final geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Moroccan Arabic (MA). The acoustic analysis revealed that, only for the word-medial contrast, the two MA speakers adopted comparable strategies in contrasting geminates with singletons, mainly by significantly lengthening closure duration in geminates, relative to singletons. In word-final position, two speaker-specific contrasting patterns emerged. While one speaker also lengthened the closure duration for final geminates, the other speaker instead lengthened only the release duration for final geminates, relative to singletons. Consonant closure and preceding vowel were significantly longer for the geminate only in medial position, not in final position. These temporal differences were even more clearly delineated in the articulatory signal, captured via ultrasound, to which we applied the novel approach of using TRACTUS [Temporally Resolved Articulatory Configuration Tracking of UltraSound: 15] to index temporal properties of closure gestures for these geminate/singleton contrasts

The production and perception of peripheral geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Arabic

Gemination is typologically common word-medially but is rare at the periphery of the word (word-initially and -finally). In line with this observation, prior research on production and perception of gemination has focused primarily on medial gemination. Much less is known about the production and perception of peripheral gemination. This PhD thesis reports on comprehensive articulatory, acoustic and perceptual investigations of geminate-singleton contrasts according to the position of the contrast in the word and in the utterance. The production component of the project investigated the articulatory and acoustic features of medial and peripheral gemination of voiced and voiceless coronal stops in Modern standard Arabic and regional Arabic vernacular dialects, as produced by speakers from two disparate and geographically distant countries, Morocco and Lebanon. The perceptual experiment investigated how standard and dialectal Arabic gemination contrasts in each word position were categorised and discriminated by three groups of non-native listeners, each differing in their native language experience with gemination at different word positions. The first experiment used ultrasound and acoustic recordings to address the extent to which word-initial gemination in Moroccan and Lebanese dialectal Arabic is maintained, as well as the articulatory and acoustic variability of the contrast according to the position of the gemination contrast in the utterance (initial vs. medial) and between the two dialects. The second experiment compared the production of word-medial and -final gemination in Modern Standard Arabic as produced by Moroccan and Lebanese speakers. The aim of the perceptual experiment was to disentangle the contribution of phonological and phonetic effects of the listeners’ native languages on the categorisation and discrimination of non-lexical Moroccan gemination by three groups of non-native listeners varying in their phonological (native Lebanese group and heritage Lebanese group, for whom Moroccan is unintelligible, i.e., non-native language) and phonetic-only (native English group) experience with gemination across the three word positions. The findings in this thesis constitute important contributions about positional and dialectal effects on the production and perception of gemination contrasts, going beyond medial gemination (which was mainly included as control) and illuminating in particular the typologically rare peripheral gemination