The Effect of the Arabic Syllabic Prosodic Features on the Production of English CV Sequences

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of the Arabic minimal prosodic unit (the syllable) on the production of English L2 CV sequences. To study the influence of phonetic context upon a given segment and the overall effect the Arabic syntagmatic features on the Arab learner's ability to reorganize in terms of English patterns, samples of conversational exchanges of some native speakers of adult/child Jordanian Arabic were recorded over a two month period. The syllable patterns that regulate the phonological organization of the conversational exchanges were described. To study the effect of the preceding and following consonants on the adjacent vowel sounds, two sets of consonantal contexts were examined: 'emphatic' vs. 'non-emphatic'. The objectives of this study are the following: (i) to identify prosodic features which span the internal structure of the Arabic word templates, e.g. the vocalic melody of frontness vs. backness (ii) to explore the Arabic language-specific phonological constraints and to determine their effect on the production of English sound patterns (iii) to study the Arabic templates which are similar in shape to English equivalents, because contrastive linguistics studies, to date, have so far focused on phonological negative interlingual transfer to the effective exclusion of positive interlingual transfer . (vi) to demonstrate how English utterances are restructured so that the constituent syllables follow typical Arabic syllabication.