| Description |
In this project, I investigate the voice onset time (VOT) of stop consonants as produced by Arabic speakers in comparison to English speakers. In English, there exists a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless pronunciations of bilabial, alveolar, and velar stop consonants. These pairs are /p/-/b/, /t/-/d/, and /k/-/g/ respectively. In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the voiceless and voiced versions of the alveolar stop, /t/-/d/, are contrastive, but the same does not apply to bilabial and velar stops. /b/ and /k/ are included in the phonological inventory of Arabic, while in many dialects of Arabic, /p/ and /g/ are not. This leads to questions about pronunciation: Do the VOTs of /b/ and /k/ coincide with the VOTS of the /t/-/d/ contrasting pair according to voicing? Or conversely, do Arabic speakers' VOTs vary more liberally in these stops due to the absence of a contrastive voiceless equivalent? This project aims to answer these questions using speech recordings by native Arabic and English speakers. |
