The Role of the Syllable in the Segmentation of Cairene Spoken Arabic

Abstract

The syllable as a perceptual unit has been investigated cross linguistically. In Cairene Arabic syllables fall into three categories, light CV, heavy CVC/CVV and superheavy CVCC/CVVC. However, heavy syllables in Cariene Arabic have varied weight depending on their position in a word, whether internal or final. The present paper investigates the role of the syllable in the segmentation of Cariene Arabic. It reports a psycholinguistic study; syllable monitoring that was conducted on 32 Egyptian Arabic native speakers to examine the perceptual role of the syllable in spoken connected language. Theoretical phonological studies have identified Cairene Arabic as a stress-timed language; however, psycholinguistic studies providing evidence for this theoretical finding are scarce. The present study which is a cross modal (visual and auditory) counterbalanced design, gives evidence for the role of the (CVC) syllable in the segmentation of Cairene spoken language.