An Experimental Investigation of the Sound System of Abha Arabic

Abstract

There is a great need for research to be undertaken in regard to under-documented dialects. Thus, this research was conducted with the primary aim of investigating the sound system of Abha Arabic which is spoken in the south-west of Saudi Arabia. Abha Arabic is an under-studied Arabic dialect compared to other varieties of Arabic. This research comprises three studies (Studies 1-3), details of which are presented in Chapters 3-5 respectively. These studies collectively involve speech analyses of 8130 tokens from 44 native Abha Arabic speakers (22 males and 22 females). The first study (reported in Chapter 3) was conducted to provide a detailed analysis of segmental aspects covering consonant and vowel inventories, as well as suprasegmental features including syllable structure and stress. A total of 1410 tokens were obtained from 16 native Abha Arabic participants, and analysed. The results provide insights into the consonant and vowel inventories of Abha Arabic as well as unusual VOT (voice onset time) patterns, devoicing of the final voiced plosives, syllabic structure, and emphasis. The second study, described in Chapter 4, focuses on the properties of emphatic sounds and adjacent vowels in the monosyllabic stimuli embedded in carrier sentences produced by 14 participants (seven males and seven females). Various acoustic cues were investigated including stop VOTs, closure duration, fricative duration, and centre of gravity of consonants, as well as the first three vowel formats and the duration of the adjacent vowel. The second study yielded 4032 tokens which were first analysed acoustically and then statistically by means of mixed-effects models. The results show that while some cues are a reliable means of distinguishing emphatics from their non-emphatic counterparts, others are not. Among the reliable cues were VOT, closure duration, and centre of gravity for the stops only. Also, the F1 and F3 are substantially higher in emphatic contexts while the F2 is significantly lower. Moreover, there appear to be no differences between males and females in terms of the phonetic realizations of vowels adjacent to emphatics. The third study, reported in Chapter 5, investigates emphasis spread using complex stimuli consisting of monosyllabic, disyllabic monomorphemic stimuli, and trisyllabic polymorphemic stimuli word-initially and word-finally. Study 3 involved 14 native Abha Arabic speakers who participated in a production task, resulting in 2688 tokens. The tokens were first analysed acoustically and then statistically by means of mixed-effects models. The results show that emphasis spread affects vowels in the same syllable to the trigger, vowels in the adjacent syllable to the trigger, and vowels in the prefixes of polymorphemic words. However, emphasis spread does not appear to affect vowels in the suffixes of polymorphemic words. The study concludes that leftward emphasis spread is more prominent than rightward emphasis spread, and emphasis spread is a phonetic process rather than a phonological one in Abha Arabic. Overall, these findings from the three studies contribute to a more thorough description of Abha Arabic, to a better understanding of phonetic and phonological variation in Arabic, and to the understanding of emphasis cross-linguistically.