Vowel length contrast in Arabic and English: A spectrographic test

Abstract

A familiar linguistic theory tends to provide articulatory explanation or add extra segmental features to capture durational contrast between segments. This model, for example, explains height effect and tensity effect on vowel duration on articulatory basis. Thus it is widely accepted that tense vowels are relatively longer than low vowels since the approximative configuration for tense vowels is said to require a longer period than that for lax vowels. Also, the fact that low vowels tend to be longer than high ones is attributed to the degree of jaw lowering needed in the configuration for low vowels. A question, however, arises in connection with the linguistic analysis of length is how do long and short features get converted into actual time intervals? Spectrographic tests of English and Arabic minimal pairs revealed that height effect on vowel duration was the same in both languages. However, English and Arabic differed considerably with respect to durational contrast between short (lax) and long (tense) vowels. These results indicate that since temporal effects, like vowel height, seem to be universal and constant across languages, it becomes more difficult to account for some other claimed physiological effects (such as the effect of voicing on preceding vowels and the long-short contrast) in physiological terms. Hence the latter effects show considerable variation among languages. We propose, instead, that temporal structures are language—specific variables which must be taken into consideration in the analysis of a language [Research supported by Yarmouk University.]