Abstract
This paper presents a comparative study which investigates the influence of Saudi Arabic guttural consonants /χ/, /ħ/ and /h/ on the vowel /a/ when they are adjacent and in the same syllable. Cohn (2007, 2009), Flemming (2001), and Keating (1996) discuss a unified model in which phonology and phonetics are treated as two distinct elements of one domain where each element has an effect on the other to some degree. McCarthy (1991, 1994), Rose (1996), Zawaydeh (1999, 2004), and BinMuqbil (2006) presented phonological studies on gutturals, as well as discussions on gutturals as a natural class, which uphold the phonological aspect of Cohn’s (2009) unified model. The aim of this study is to address the phonetic aspect of Cohn’s (2009) unified model by analyzing the phonetic effects of guttural-vowel coarticulation. An acoustic analysis method was used as a framework for this investigation to extract first formant frequency (F1) and second formant frequency (F2) to measure the influence in the coarticulation. For the purpose of this study, seven native Saudi Arabic speakers were recorded pronouncing 70 Saudi Arabic words. The results showed that guttural consonants have an influence on the vowel /a/ by lowering and backing it when they are adjacent and in the same syllable, while the vowel /a/ in the nonguttural consonants is raising and fronting their adjacent vowel /a/ in the same syllable in comparison with the vowel /a/ in the guttural environment.
Highlights
This study presents/investigates in three levels of comparison: In this study, it was found that the total mean of the first formant frequency (F1) of the adjacent vowel /a/ in the same syllable of the guttural consonants by the seven speakers is higher than the first formant frequency (F1) of following vowels /a/ of the nonguttural consonants, which means that guttural consonants have an effect on their adjacent vowels by lowering them
The total mean of the second formant frequency (F2) of the adjacent vowel /a/ of the guttural consonants is lower by the 7 speakers than the adjacent vowel /a/ of the nonguttural consonants, which would be interpreted as guttural consonants having an influence on their adjacent by backing them
This paper presented my findings and analysis of the phonetic influence the Saudi Arabic guttural consonants /χ/, /ħ/, and /h/ have on the vowel /a/ when they are adjacent and in the same syllable
Summary
Many linguists (Wright, 1964; Al-Ani, 1970; Brame, 1971; Ghazeli, 1977; Al-Sweel, 1987; Al-Mozainy, 1981; Abd-el Jawad, 1991; McCarthy, 1991, 1994; Yeou, 2001; Watson, 2002; Zawadeh, 2004; Bin-Muqbil, 2006; Al-Tamimi, 2007) have studied the phonological and sound systems of Arabic and its dialects in general, as well as the gutturals (Note 1) in specific They found that gutturals in Standard Arabic and its dialects show phonological regularity such as (a) avoiding two gutturals in one syllable, (b) failing to occur in the coda position while there is no onset, and (c) spreading the [+low] feature by changing a [+high] vowel into [+low] vowel. These authors presented a unified model which aims to map the effects phonetics and phonology has on each other
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