Temporal Coordination and Sonority of Jazani Arabic Word-Initial Clusters

Mohammed Q Ruthan,Yen-Hwei Lin,Karthik Durvasula

doi:10.3765/amp.v7i0.4485

Mohammed Q Ruthan, Yen-Hwei Lin + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v7i0.4485

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Abstract

Previous research on the organization of syllable-structure, relying on the timing of the articulators suggests that though both English and Moroccan Arabic have word-initial consonant clusters, Moroccan Arabic does not have complex onsets, while English does (Browman and Goldstein, 1988; Byrd, 1995; Shaw et al., 2011). However, typically, such research employs expensive articulatory equipment. This limits the research to those who have access to such technology. Here, we advocate the use of the acoustic measurements with carefully selected stimuli. We conducted an experiment on 7 native speakers of Jazani Arabic, who produced 6 repetitions of 78 target words (34 real, 44 nonce), which varied in the number of onset consonant (C1, C2), and the sonority profiles. Similarly, to Moroccan Arabic, the results show that onset consonant alignments in Jazani Arabic are consistent with the simplex onset organization. Unlike Italian, the temporal pattern of Jazani Arabic remained the same, as simplex onsets across the sonority profiles. The study shows the effectiveness of acoustic measurements as a tool to understand syllabic organization, through studying the temporal co-ordination patterns.

Highlights

There is a need for more techniques/methodologies to establish syllable structure, especially in cases where traditional analytic techniques do not lead to a clear parse
4.1 Stability Patterns in Jazani Arabic Data The first research question asks whether the syllabic organization of word-initial sequences in Jazani Arabic is a simplex or complex onset
We investigated the syllabic organization of word-initial consonant sequences in Jazani Arabic and presented evidence from the patterns of temporal stability that showed that Jazani Arabic word-initial consonant sequences are simplex onsets rather than complex onsets

Summary

Introduction

There is a need for more techniques/methodologies to establish syllable structure, especially in cases where traditional analytic techniques do not lead to a clear parse. In a pioneering study on the temporal organization in English syllables, Browman & Goldstein (1988) analyzed articulatory data from the Tokyo x-ray microbeam database that consisted of sets of nonsense words with shifted word boundaries, such as [splats] and [plats]. They measured the duration from the end of the vowel gesture (anchor) to three different points in the preceding consonant sequence: (a) the left-most consonant in the consonant sequence (leftedge), (b) the mean of the midpoints of all the consonants in the consonant sequence (c-center), (c) and the right-most consonant in the consonant sequence (right-edge). They found that the c-center to anchor interval duration was the most consistent (least variant) across different number of consonants in the syllable onset

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