| Description |
Arabic has a set of sounds called emphatics that contrast with their plain counterparts in secondary articulation. Previous research has indicated the presence of socially conditioned variation, realized in the consonants themselves and adjacent vowels. However, these investigations, have been limited by methodological problems in subjects' recruitment and data elicitation procedures, which may have resulted in contradictory conclusions about the acoustics of emphasis and their social dimension. The present study explored the acoustics of emphatics and the social dimension of acoustic variation in emphasis production in Amman, the capital of Jordan. The study investigated the effect of extralinguistic variables, such as gender, social class, and origin of the speaker. The study focused on the acoustic cues of two emphatic phonemes, the alveolar fricative /sˤ/ and the alveolar stop /tˤ/ and their plain counterparts /s/ and /t/. The acoustic analysis examined the Center of Gravity of the stops and fricatives, Voice Onset Time of stops, and the formant frequencies of vowels adjacent to target sounds. As the results of the study point to gender, social class, and the original dialect of the speaker as important sources of variation in emphasis, they provide strong argument for the inclusion of social class and original regional dialect in the sociophonetic inquiry of Arabic in Jordan. |
