Abstract
Emphasis (contrastive uvularisation) in Arabic spreads from an emphatic consonant to neighboring segments (Davis 1995). The effect of emphasis spread on a consonant is manifested as lowering of its spectral mean (Jongman et al. 2011). Although stop consonants reveal a strong effect of emphasis, it is not known how emphasis spread affects other acoustic properties of stops, e.g. voice onset time (VOT). Previous studies (Kulikov 2018) showed that VOT and emphasis are linked in speech production: plain /t/ in Gulf Arabic is aspirated; emphatic /ṭ/ has short-lag VOT. Phonological theory predicts that plain /t/ should become more emphatic in emphatic context, which might reduce stop VOT as well. The current study investigates the effect of emphasis spread on VOT in word-initial coronal stops in Qatari Arabic. The stimuli, produced by sixteen native speakers of Qatari Arabic, contained target plain and emphatic stops /t/, /ṭ/ followed by short or long low vowel, and plain coronal obstruents /t, s, ð/ or their emphatic counterparts /ṭ, ṣ, ð̣/. The acoustic analysis included measurements of VOT and spectral mean of burst in the stop, and F1, F2, F3 frequencies at the vowel beginning, middle and end. The results showed that final emphatic obstruent triggered emphasis spread across the syllable. The effect of emphasis on the vowel was stronger next to the emphatic obstruent (p < .01). Spectral mean of burst in plain /t/ was lower in the emphatic context (D = 276 Hz, p = .05). VOT, however, was not affected by emphasis spread. Plain /t/ had long-lag VOT averaging 52 ms; emphatic /ṭ/ had short-lag VOT averaging 17 ms. These values were not different in emphatic context (p = .743). The findings demonstrate that emphasis spread within a syllable affects only spectral characteristics of a coronal stop. Emphaticness of plain /t/ did not affect its VOT and did not result in complete transformation of the stop category
Highlights
Emphasis, or uvularization/pharyngealization, is a contrastive feature in Arabic that distinguishes a group of coronal obstruents with a secondary constriction in the posterior area of the vocal tract
Vowel quality was evaluated in the unambiguous plain context, when it was flanked by two plain consonants, and in the unambiguous emphatic context, when it was flanked by two emphatic consonants
The goal of this study was to investigate whether syllable initial plain stop /t/ is affected by leftward emphasis spread in Qatari Arabic and whether this affects stop voice onset time (VOT)
Summary
Uvularization/pharyngealization, is a contrastive feature in Arabic that distinguishes a group of coronal obstruents with a secondary constriction in the posterior area of the vocal tract. Emphatic articulation in obstruents affects preceding and following segments resulting in socalled emphasis spread (McCarthy 1994, Davis 1995, Watson 1999). Phonological analysis of emphasis spread typically represents emphatic coarticulation as sharing the [RTR] feature (McCarthy 1994, Davis 1995). Even in the dialects with both types of emphasis spread, leftward spread typically invariably affects all segments (Zawaydeh & de Jong 2002), but rightward spread can be blocked by some categories of segments, e.g. high segments /i, j, ʃ/, at least in some Arabic dialects (Davis 1995)
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