Revisiting acoustic correlates of pharyngealization in Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic: Implications for formal representations

Abstract

This exploratory study of Jordanian and Moroccan Arabic (JA and MA) aims to evaluate whether pharyngealization is associated with an epilaryngeal constriction which causes ‘retraction’ and tense voice quality in surrounding vowels, following the Laryngeal Articulator Model (LAM) (Esling, 2005). Twenty male speakers (10 per dialect) produced vowels preceded by /d or dˤ/. Thirteen acoustic correlates obtained at the onset and midpoint were used to assess this type of constriction. A predictive modeling approach was used; starting with Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Effects modeling followed by Conditional Random Forest for classification. Vowels in the pharyngealized context were more open (higher F1, Z1-Z0), more back (lower F2, higher Z3-Z2), more compact (lower Z2-Z1), and showed spectral divergence (higher Z3-Z2). Voice quality results showed these vowels to be produced with a tense voice. High classification rates of 93.5% for JA and 91.1% for MA were obtained and variable importance score showed formant-based measures outperform voice quality ones. This suggests pharyngealization has ‘retraction,’ with a back and down gesture, as a primary correlate followed by [+CONSTRICTED GLOTTIS]. The implications of these results provide strong support for LAM, the feature [+CET], and the use of the epilarynx to describe pharyngealization.