Sam Hellmuth

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive (e.g., /daraba/, hit; /doriba/, was hit) were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences in which in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., /bijad/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed their parsing preference for active verb analysis, and garden path effects were observed. When reading fully diacritized sentences, readers incurred only a small cost, likely due to increased visual crowding, but did not extensively process the (mostly superfluous) diacritics, thus resulting in a lack of benefit from the disambiguating diacritics on the passive verb. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)

This chapter deals with accentual systems in the languages spoken in the Middle East and includes a discussion of a number of isolate ancient languages and some Afro-Asiatic languages, notably Egyptian and Semitic languages. The notion ‘Middle East ’ is not well-defined linguistically, and

This paper explores the acquisition of phonetic and phonological realisation of word stress, by Arabic speaking second language learners of English, in a small production study. Spoken Arabic dialects differ from each other in the phonology of stress, and the phonetic realisation of stress may also vary across dialects. In the present study the English speech productions of learners from two Arabic dialectal backgrounds (Cairo and Amman) is compared to permit disambiguation between L1 transfer and 'learner intonation' as the source of any non‐native‐like patterns in the phonological and/or phonetic realisation of stress. Phonetic realisation is investigated by means of quantitative acoustic analysis of read speech experimental data, with comparison to L1 Arabic and native English speaker control data. Phonological realisation is investigated by means of auditory qualitative analysis of read speech narrative data. No differences are found in the phonetic realisation of stress between the two Arabic dialects under consideration, however differences are found between the realisation of stress in Arabic as compared to English. In the L2 English production data, the results show a clear pattern of L1 transfer in the phonetic realisation of stress, in particular in lack of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables; this contrasts with

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope, whereas back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /uː/ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /iː/-/uː/ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /iː/ from /uː/ by both young and older Standard Southern British English listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /iː/ if it has a rising F2 slope and as /uː/ if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /ɛ/-/ɒ/ and /æ/-/ɒ/, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in Standard Southern British English, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+front], whereas a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front].

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacritics were presented in either modes. Heterophonic homographic target verbs that have different pronunciations in active and passive (e.g., /daraba/, hit; /doriba/, was hit) were embedded in temporarily ambiguous sentences in which in the absence of diacritics, readers cannot be certain whether the verb was active or passive. Passive sentences were disambiguated by an extra word (e.g., /bijad/, by the hand of). Our results show that readers benefitted from the disambiguating diacritics when present only on the homographic verb. When disambiguating diacritics were absent, Arabic readers followed t...