Pharyngealization in Libyan (Tripoli) Arabic: an instrumental study.

This thesis aims to study the phenomenon of pharyngealization in Arabic, in the dialect of Tripoli, Libya in relation to other dialects of Arabic. The term 'pharyngealization', as used in this study, refers to all the sounds whose main articulatory requisite is a constriction in the pharyngeal cavity. This is a physiological and articulatory study -based primarily on observations made on video-endoscopic and video-fluorographic recordings; spectrographic analysisq palatographic and airflow measurements also contributed. Chapter 1 states the aim and scope of this thesis. It defines the dialect studied and describes some of the main aspects of the sound system of Tripoli Arabic. Chapter 2 gives a description of the main structures and muscles and their actions that are considered to, directly or indirectly, play the major role in the production of these sounds. Chapter 3 describes the experimental techniques used in this study: a) fibreoptic endoscopy with videorecording b) X-ray recording; static, xeroradiography and videofluorography c) airflow recording by pneumotachography d) palatography e) labiography and f) spectrography. Chapter 4 deals with the pharyngeal consonants and studies certain issues related to their phonetic realizations and to the role of the epiglottis in their production. Chapter 5 describes the uvular consonants. Endoscopic observation revealed a great side wall movement of the pharynx occurring during the articulation of the uvular /q/, which takes place at a superior level in the pharynx. Chapter 6 deals with the pharyngealized consonants, divides them into primary and secondary and attempts to show that a large part of the problem in the description of these sounds stems from a phonemic split in the vowel /a:/. Chapter 7 discusses the main findings in this study and shows, among other things, that a great epiglotto-pharyngeal constriction is the main articulatory requisite in the articulation of the pharyngeal sounds in Arabic, irrespective of other factors. It also attempts to determine to what extent soft palate lowering and nasal airflow are coterminous with the articulation of the pharyngeal sounds

Hearing Hebrew Pharyngeals: Experimental evidence for a covert phonemic distinction

We report a lexical decision task experiment, in which words were manipulated such that two different sounds had been switched with each other: the voiceless pharyngeal and uvular fricatives. The former is a marked sound of some dialects of Modern Hebrew, the latter is a merged category corresponding to both the historical pharyngeal and the uvular in the production of most speakers. The two categories are represented by different letters in the orthographic system and each is associated with unique phonological processes. Socially, the pharyngeal is stereotyped; merging the categories is both more common and more prestigious in most social contexts. Speakers of Modern Hebrew with varied linguistic backgrounds, including Merged speakers who have not been exposed to non-merged dialects during most of their lives, are very good at acoustically distinguishing between these sounds (only slightly underperforming compared with Non-merged speakers). Nevertheless, we found that manipulated stimuli - which were not part of the input for language learners of either dialect - provoke different acceptance rates and reaction times, depending on the listener\u27s home dialect, in certain cases regardless of their production grammar. In particular, Non-merged speakers and Merged speakers who are 2nd generation listeners to non-merged dialects rejected switched category items at much higher rates and took longer to process them compared with Merged speakers who did not have early experience with the categorical distinction. We discuss these findings in the context of models of phonological representation and auditory word recognition

Voice quality features in the production of pharyngeal consonants by Iraqi Arabic speakers

PhD ThesisThis study investigates nasalisation and laryngealisation in the production of pharyngeal consonants in Iraqi Arabic (IA) and as potential voice quality (VQ) settings of IA speakers in general. Pharyngeal consonants have been the subject of investigation in many studies on Arabic, primarily due to the wide range of variation in their realisation across dialects, including approximant, fricative, and stop variants. This is the first quantitative study of its kind to extend these findings to IA and to investigate whether any of the variants and/or VQ features are dialect- specific. The study offers a detailed auditory and acoustic account of the realisations of pharyngeal consonants as produced by nine male speakers of three Iraqi dialects: Baghdad (representing Central gelet), Basra (representing Southern gelet) and Mosul (representing Northern qeltu) (Blanc, 1964; Ingham, 1997). Acoustic cues of nasalisation and phonation types are investigated in isolated vowels, oral, nasal, and pharyngeal environments in order to unravel the source of the nasalised and laryngealised VQ percept and to establish whether their manifestations are categorical or particular to certain contexts. Results suggest a range of realisations for the pharyngeals that are conditioned by word position and dialect. Regardless of realisation, VQ measurements suggest that: 1- nasalisation increases when pharyngeals are adjacent to nasals, beyond what is expected of a nasal environment; 2- vowels neighbouring pharyngeals show more nasalisation than in oral environments; 3- vowels in pharyngeal contexts and isolation show more laryngealisation compared with nasal and oral contexts; 4- both nasals and pharyngeals show progressive effect of nasalisation, and pharyngeals show a progressive effect of laryngealisation; 5- /ħ/ shows more nasalisation but less laryngealisation effect on neighbouring vowels than /ʕ/; and 6- Baghdad speech is the most nasalised and laryngealised and Basra speech the least. These results coincide with observations on Muslim Baghdadi gelet having a guttural quality (Bellem, 2007). The study reveals that the overall percept of a nasalised and laryngealised VQ in IA is a local feature rather than a general vocal setting

Tafxi:m in the vowels of Muslawi Qeltu and Baghdadi Gilit dialects of Mesopotamian Arabic

PhD ThesisTafxiːm defines a post-velar place of articulation, under which it may subsume consonantal (C) and vocalic (V) Place features for consonantal and vocalic elements that are the correlates of tafxi:m in sounds specified as underlyingly mufaxxama (heavy or dark) sounds in auditory terms (Jackobson,1957), also called post-velars (PVs). A considerable amount of research on tafxi:m in vowels is done on dialects of Arabic of different linguistic backgrounds (Herzallah, 1990; Zawaydeh, 1999; Shahin 2003). However, not much has been done on tafxi:m in the vowels of Mesopotamian Arabic (MA) dialects, the Muslawi Qəltu (MQ) and Baghdadi Gilit (BG) of two different linguistic backgrounds where tafxi:m in vowels is thought to be driven by the dialect background. In the dialects of Arabic including the Mesopotamian sedentary Muslawi Qəltu and Bedouin Baghdadi Gilit dialects under investigation, the post-velars (PVs) represent sounds with two locations for two manners of articulation: the pharyngeals which include the /ʕ/ and the /ħ/, and the uvulars which include the /q/, the /χ/ and /ʁ/. The third group of sounds are the pharyngealised coronals, the so-called emphatics (i.e. heavy or dark). They are represented with two places of articulation. The coronal place as their primary articulation and the pharyngeal place as their secondary articulation. The pharyngealised coronals include sounds with two manners of articulations; that is the stops /tˤ/, and the fricatives /ðˤ/and /sˤ/. They represent the dark or heavy counterparts of the plain stops /t/, /d/, and the plain fricatives /ð/, /s/ respectively (ibid). Tafxi:m in vowels as driven by PV mufaxxama sounds is defined as lowering, retraction, centralisation or as rounding being conditioned by the nature of articulatory feature (constriction) in the trigger PV mufaxxama and is being conditioned by the presence of particular lexemes identified as secondary mufaxxama. However, the featural manifestations of PVs in vowels, and the presence of secondary mufaxxama is phonologically governed by vowel quality and is specific to a particular language or dialect. In this research, it is found that the featural manifestation of tafxi:m are presented both locally and in long domain as backing and backing and rounding in the /i/ and /a/ vowels in Baghdadi Gilit of Bedouin origin with a significant drop in F2 onset in a uvular and pharyngealised PV context conditioned by lexemes identified as secondary PVs (mufaxxama) and are phonologically driven by the dialect background. III On the other hand, tafxi:m is featured as lowering in the /a/ vowel in Muslawi Qəltu of sedentary origin with a significant rise in F1 onset in a uvular context. In MQ, a sedentary vowel feature known as ʔima:la (vowel fronting) of /u/ and centralisation of /i/ vowels occur in domains where it is present as lowering or retraction of /u/ in Gilit. In long / i:, a:, u:/ vowels, tafxi:m is represented as lowering and centralisation with significant lowering of /i:/ and /u:/ in a uvular context in Muslawi Qəltu compared to /a:/ lowering and centralisation in a pharyngeal and pharyngealized context in Baghdadi Gilit. Tafxi:m is also represented as a feature of harmony which is introduced in non-local vowels as /u/ vowel colouring or /a/ backing in Baghdadi Gilit when secondary mufaxxama sounds are present in the same phonological domain

Abstraction of phonological representations in adult nonnative speakers

Perception of nonnative contrasts by adult second language (L2) learners is affected by native language phonology. The current study contrasted predictions from two models of L2 phonological acquisition that focus on different representational levels as the origin of native language transfer: the abstract categorization level from the Perceptual Assimilation Model for L2 learners (PAM-L2; Best & Tyler, 2007) and the phonetic level from the Automatic Selective Perception model (ASP; Strange, 2011). The target phonemes were pairs of Arabic consonants that were equally similar on the abstract categorization level but unequally similar on the phonetic level – voiced and voiceless pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/, /ħ/ and uvular fricatives /χ/, /ʁ/. Twenty intermediate-level English-speaking Arabic L2 learners and 10 Arabic native speakers (NS) completed auditory identification and discrimination tasks. We first conducted a discriminant analysis (DA) to quantify ASP predictions based on phonetic variables. L2 learners were generally more accurate when perceiving the pharyngeal consonants compared to the uvulars and when perceiving the voiced phonemes compared to the voiceless. These findings, and L2 learners' perceptual variation across contexts, predicted by the DA, suggest that L2 speakers were able to track phonetic cues during L2 perception and thus favor the ASP. These results support the interpretation that L2 learners attend to the phonetic detail in nonnative segments; however, they do not build nativelike phonological representations for the segments with weaker phonetic cues. This ability to process low-level phonetic cues opens the possibility for learners to create more robust phonological representations

Similarity and Enhancement: Nasality from Moroccan Arabic Pharyngeals and Nasals

Experimental studies of the articulation, acoustics, and perception of nasal and pharyngeal consonants and adjacent vowels were conducted to investigate nasality in Moroccan Arabic (MA). The status of nasality in MA is described as coarticulatorily complex, where two phoneme types (pharyngeal segments and nasal segments) yield similar non-contrastive coarticulatory information (nasality) on adjacent vowels. The production and perception of the coarticulatory complexity of nasality in MA is the focus of this dissertation. An aerodynamic study demonstrated that nasal airflow is reliably present during the production of pharyngeal consonants, yet to a degree less than nasal consonants. This study also indicated this nasality is coarticulated on vowels adjacent to pharyngeal and nasal consonants. An acoustic study confirmed the patterns of coarticulatory nasality from nasals and pharyngeals and explored how nasality as a coarticulatory complex feature, a feature associated with two distinct segment types, affects its patterning in the language. This study reveals that vowel nasality is perceptually associated with pharyngeal, as well as nasal, consonants in MA, as evidenced by faster reaction times when vowel nasality was present in a lexical repetition task, compared to a condition where there was no vowel nasality, evidence that non-contrastive coarticulatory information is indeed perceptually informative not only in the context of phonologically nasal segments, but also in the context of pharyngeal consonants. Furthermore, there is evidence of perceptual compensation for nasality, wherein in the context of pharyngeal consonants listeners show patterns that suggest they do not \u22hear\u22 vowel nasality but rather attribute it to its source. Together, this is evidence of partial compensation since listeners retain sensitivity to and facilitation from vowel nasality, revealed by faster response times in the lexical repetition task. The results of the experiments outlined in this dissertation suggest 1) that nasality is a property of pharyngeal consonants and adjacent vowels that is highly controlled by speakers in order to maintain distinctiveness between pharyngeal and nasal consonant nasality and 2) that nasality is being utilized as a secondary, enhancement feature for pharyngeal consonants, potentially to maintain the distinctiveness of pharyngeal segments from the other guttural phonological class consonants in MA

THE ACOUSTIC AND PERCEPTUAL CORRELATES OF EMPHASIS IN URBAN JORDANIAN ARABIC

Abstract Acoustic and perceptual correlates of emphasis, a secondary articulation in the posterior vocal tract, in Urban Jordanian Arabic were studied. CVC monosyllables and CV.CVC bisyllables with emphatic and plain target consonants in word-initial, word-medial and word-final positions were examined. Spectral measurements on the target vowels at vowel onset, midpoint and offset revealed a significant increase in F1 and F3 and a decrease in F2 in emphatic compared to plain environments. Emphasis was observed more in the environment of high and low front vowels than high back vowels, anticipatory emphasis spread was more salient than perseveratory emphasis spread, and males showed more emphasis than females. Spectral moment measures of the target consonants themselves revealed inconsistent or no effects of emphasis. Results from a perception experiment with cross-spliced monosyllables showed that perception of emphasis follows the vowel, not the consonant, in the emphatic syllable, thus confirming the results of the acoustic experiments