An acoustic study of the production of Iraqi Arabic stop consonants

Abstract EN

In this study, an acoustic description of the Iraqi Arabic (IA) stop consonants, /p, b, t, d, k, g, ṭ, q and ʔ/ in initial, medial and final positions in isolation and in carrier phrase was carried out.

The acoustic parameters that were investigated were closure duration (CD), burst duration (BD) and voice onset time (VOT).

The study aimed to contribute to the phonetic description of IA speech sounds by acoustically describing its stops and to find out whether there were differences between IA stops and the English stops.

The data was collected from 20 educated subjects, 10 males and 10 females.

In terms of CD, it was found that the IA voiceless stops had longer CD than the IA voiced stops.

It was also found that the labial stops had longer CD than the alveolars and the velars.

The results also showed that /q/ had longer CD than the others with some exceptions and /ṭ/ had longer CD than its plain counterpart, /t/.

In terms of BD, it was found that the IA voiceless stops had shorter BD than the English stops and thus they were less aspirated than the English voiceless stops.

Only /t/ and /k/ were found to be aspirated.

In terms of the voiced stops, unlike the English voiced stops, it was found that the IA voiced stops were fully voiced which means that they have voicing during the closure represented by negative VOT values.

The glottal stop showed a good example of a normal stop consonant only in initial and final positions in isolation.

In other contexts, it showed a great deal of variability in its spectrogram where its acoustic make ups were not observed.