Children’s Development of the Arabic Emphatic Consonants; An Acoustic Investigation

Abstract

This thesis examines the developmental trajectory in the production of plain-emphatic consonant contrasts among Saudi-Hijazi-Arabic-speaking children aged 3 to 6 years. The production of the articulatory complex emphatic consonants involves a primary coronal constriction and a secondary pharyngeal/uvular constriction. Acoustically, emphatics exert a strong anticipatory and carryover coarticulatory influence that can extend to all segments within the same word, a phenomenon termed ‘emphasis spread’(e.g., J. Al-Tamimi, 2017; Card, 1983; Jongman et al., 2011; Khattab et al., 2006; Zawaydeh & de Jong, 2011). Prior research, primarily based on impressionistic data, suggests emphatic segments are typically late acquired, after the age of 4 years (e.g., Alqattan, 2015; Amayreh, 2003; Amayreh & Dyson, 1998). However, auditory judgments may not fully capture the subtle developmental changes or gradations in the production of these consonants that are detectable through acoustic analysis (Macken & Barton, 1980; Mashaqba et al., 2022). Consequently, this thesis aims to acoustically examine the acquisition route of these complex emphatic consonants, focusing on both the consonantal and vocalic cues to the plain-emphatic contrast across different phonetic contexts. Specifically, this thesis acoustically examines the production of emphatic consonants across different word positions, initial, medial, and final, across three vocalic contexts, /aː/, /iː/, and /uː/, and whether the effect of the emphatic segment extends bidirectionally beyond the immediately adjacent vowel. Target consonants examined were the voiceless plain-emphatic obstruents /t/ vs. /tˤ/ and /s/ vs. /sˤ/. A single-word repetition task was used to elicit speech from 38 Saudi-Hijazi -Arabic-speaking children aged between 3;1 to 6;11, and 13 adults serving as reference data. The acoustic measurements taken were VOT of stops and F1 and F2 of adjacent vowels. Across these three studies, children demonstrate a non-linear developmental trajectory, initially showing a faster increase in the size of the plain-emphatic contrast with age, with the rate of this increase slowing down as children grow older. Furthermore, there is substantial alignment between child and adult production patterns concerning positional effects, vowel context effects, and emphasis spread patterns, highlighting the potential role of input on the development of emphatic consonants. Finally, female children produced, on average, larger contrasts than males. The findings of each study are discussed in relation to previous literature on emphatic production in adults, serving as a benchmark for understanding the developmental stages and strategies observed by children. References to various aspects of child phonology and production, including the cross-linguistic development of coarticulation, are also discussed.