Variation in Realizations of r in Saudi Arabian Arabic : an auditory and acoustic study of two age-groups of female speakers

Abstract EN

the topic of this study is the realization of /r/ in Saudi Arabian Arabic as a function of prosodic context and speaker age, with a particular focus on the tap variant.

Ten female native speakers were recorded reading aloud the Arabic version of the North Wind and the Sun passage (Thelwall & Sa'adeddin 1999 : 53-4).

Half of them were aged 22yrs, the other half 55yrs.

The passage contains 14 instances of /r/ in six prosodic contexts.

Through auditory analysis supplemented by inspection of waveforms and spectrograms, each token was classified into one of four general phonetic categories.

Results show certain realizations of /r/ are more likely in certain contexts, although not to the exclusion of other realizations.