Doctoral Dissertation Research: Plain, Emphatic, and Pharyngeal Consonants in Palestinian Arabic

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Languages rely on acoustic differences (contrasts) between similar sounds to distinguish words with different meanings, such as between /p/ and /b/ in 'pen' and 'Ben'. Arabic contrasts three types of sounds: plain dental, emphatic, and pharyngeal consonants. For dentals, the tongue tip touches the upper teeth, while pharyngeals have a constriction in the throat. Emphatic consonants combine the dental and pharyngeal constrictions and sound similar to plain dentals to those who do not speak Arabic. Speakers must recognize the differences between these consonants to distinguish words with important meaning differences (such as between the Arabic words for 'member' and 'enemy'). The acoustic characteristics of these consonants are not well understood. This research tests the hypothesis that listeners identify these consonants through their effects on adjacent and non-adjacent vowels within the same word. This project will explore how speakers produce and identify plain, emphatic, and pharyngeal consonants in Palestinian Arabic. The outcomes of this project can improve language recognition programs, develop teaching materials for learners of Arabic, and inform our understanding of human language processing. Data will be collected through production and perception experiments. For the production experiments, native speakers will record words containing plain dental, emphatic, or pharyngeal consonants. The investigator will measure acoustic characteristics of these consonants and of adjacent and non-adjacent vowels to explore how these consonant classes differ, how they affect adjacent vowels, if they affect different vowels, and whether their effects extend to the whole word or only the adjacent vowel. The findings of the production experiments will be used to conduct a perception experiment that tests how speakers use these acoustic cues to distinguish the different classes of consonants. The combination of experiments will identify which effects are crucial to distinguish these classes, and the comparison to pharyngeals may provide clues about the articulation of emphatic consonants. This project will further the field of linguistics by expanding our understanding of phonological and phonetic processes to account for non-local phonological processes in Arabic. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.