Vowel nasality as a perceptual cue to pharyngeal consonants in moroccan arabic

Abstract

Pharyngeal consonants have been shown cross-linguistically to be co-articulated with velopharyngeal port opening (Bladon and Al-Bamerni, 1982, Elgendy, 2001). We examined whether coarticulatory vowel nasality is a perceptual cue to an adjacent pharyngeal, and/or nasal, consonant in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Monosyllabic MA words spoken by a native speaker containing a pharyngeal, voiced /ʕ/ or voiceless /ℏ/, or a nasal /n,m/ were cross-spliced with vowels from other contexts creating two conditions per word: “Oral” stimuli were pharyngeals cross-spliced with pharyngealized vowels (i.e., adjacent to /d ʕ/) or nasals cross-spliced with oral vowels (i.e., adjacent to /d/). “Nasal” stimuli were cross-spliced with nasal vowels. The stimuli were presented to nine native MA speakers in a timed lexical repetition task. An RM ANOVA of repetition times showed a significant interaction between nasality, consonant, and directionality [F(7,324) = 3.755, p=0.046]. For anticipatory coarticulation, vowel nasality resulted in faster RTs, indicating facilitated perception for voiced /ʕ/ (t(52) = 1.67, p =.001) but not voiceless /ℏ/. For carryover coarticulation, vowel nasality resulted in faster RTs for /ℏ/ (t(52)=2.05,p = .02), but not /ʕ/. In both directions, vowel nasality resulted in faster RTs for nasals. These results indicate that MA listeners use vowel nasality as a perceptual cue to a word with a pharyngeal segment.