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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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This paper investigates the duration of single consonants and two-consonant
clusters in Modern Standard Arabic as produced by Tunisian male subjects.
The data consisted of 105 words of the type CVCVCV and CVCCVCV with
stress on the first syllable. The results show that in Arabic, a language
which contrasts geminate and simple consonants, the durations of single
stops are considerably shorter than those reported for English or Dutch.
The results also show that the observed duration of a two-consonant
cluster exceeds the sum of the durations of each consonant when it
occurs as singleton. The lengthening of consonants in clusters, as
opposed the compression reported in other languages, is observed in
both obstruents and sonorants, and is inversely proportional to the
duration of single consonants. The paper also discusses the effects
of variables such as position within the cluster, voicing and major
class features on the duration of simple consonants and clusters.
Bibliographic reference. Rejili, Chokri / Ghazali, Salem (2003): "Consonant cluster duration in modern standard", In ICPhS-15, 1105-1108.