Durational cues for gemination in Lebanese Arabic

Résumé En

This paper reports on phonetic and phonological patterns of gemination in Lebanese Arabic (LA) and on the temporal relationship between geminate consonants and vowel length. Six males and six females from Beirut were recorded reading target word-lists containing disyllables with medial singleton and geminate consonants preceded by long and short vowels. Acoustic and auditory analyses of medial consonants and of preceding and following vowels were conducted. Results show separate durational distributions for singleton and geminate consonants and for short and long vowels in word-list style. There was no evidence for the temporal compensation between medial consonants and preceding vowels that is normally reported in the literature and that is linked to the perceptual enhancement of gemination and the syllabic structure of medial geminates. Instead, the intrinsic length of medial consonants was the main driver of preceding vowel length. In terms of manner of articulation, fricatives were the longest consonants and liquids the shortest, but the ratio of singleton to geminate was highest for liquids, which may compensate for the lack of phonetic length and help maintain the salience of the geminate contrast for this category of sounds. There were no differences between males and females in the realisation of contrastive length in consonants and vowels; their durational patterns were on the whole very similar apart from slight differences in singleton to geminate ratios and final syllable lengthening, which was more evident in males then females.