The effect of voiceless-voiced consonants on vowel duration in Arabic

Abstract EN

The phenomenon of vowel shortening before voiceless consonants (in contrast to vowel lengthening before voiced consonants) has been reported in many languages.

The present study aims at examining the effect of postvocalic voicing of final stop consonants on the preceding vowels in Arabic.

The durations of the Arabic vowels /a: /, /u: / and /i: / were measured in a CVC context where the final consonant was either /t/ or /d/.

Three minimal pairs were read in a carrier sentence by ten native speakers of Arabic (three times each) and 180 tokens were obtained.

A spectrogram was obtained for each token, and the duration of each vowel was measured.

In addition, the closure durations of the final stops, i.

e.

/t/ and /d/, were also measured in an attempt to find out any correlation that may exist between the durations of the closure of these stops.

The results of the analysis showed that the vowels before /d/ were significantly longer than those before /t/; though the duration difference average was not very long compared to English.

As for closure duration, no significant difference was found.

These results were discussed in relation to similar findings found in other languages.