Abstract
The present study investigates the effect of gender and social class on the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic. To achieve this goal, 40 participants were recorded reading a list of minimal pairs, and several acoustic measurements were taken, including VOT (voiceless stops), post-release duration (voiced stops), friction duration, vowel duration, and vowel formant frequencies (F1–F3) at onset and midpoint positions.
The results of the study reveal that significant gender and social class differences in emphasis production have different linguistic distributions. Gender differences were relevant at F1 and F2 at the onset and midpoint, whereas social class differences were evident at the onset position of F1 and F2, vowel duration, and the post-release duration of the voiced emphatic stop. Generally, male speakers produced stronger cues of emphasis, the non-prestigious form, than female speakers, as they made more F1 raising and F2 lowering in the emphatic environment. Strong emphasis cues were also favored by the lower-middle class speakers.
The results also showed that the effect of gender significantly intersects with that of social class. At F1(onset and midpoint), significant gender differences existed only within the upper-class group. At F2 midpoint, however, gender differences were evident only in the lower-middle class group.
Acknowledgements
This research project was partially funded by The Erasmus Mundus Hermes mobility program at the University of Genoa during June 2015. We are very grateful for the financial support by Hermes and the assistance of our colleagues at the Modern Languages & Cultures Department at the host institution. We would like to extend our gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for Folia Linguistica for their insightful comments, which greatly improved the manuscript. We are also grateful to Kathryn Pruitt, Arizona State University, for her comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We are grateful to our colleague, Dr Majdi Abudalbuh, who provided us with his expertise that greatly assisted in the research. We thank Dr Ryan LaBrozzi, Bridgewater State University, for his assistance in proofreading the manuscript. Thanks are also due to the audience of the 30th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics at Stony Brook, NY, for their supportive feedback. We would like to thank Mohammad Shatnawi and Ruba Rashid for their help in collecting the data of the study. We also thank our participants for their cooperation and patience.
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Appendix: List of stimuli
Arabic word | English gloss | Arabic word | English gloss |
---|---|---|---|
tiib | non-word | tˁiib | ‘perfume’ |
tuub | ‘repent’ | tˁuub | ‘blocks’ |
taab | ‘repented’ | tˁaab | ‘he recovered’ |
siib | ‘leave’ | sˁiib | ‘touch’ |
suub | non-word | sˁuub | non-word |
saab | ‘left’ | sˁaab | ‘he touched’ |
ðiib | ‘wolf’ | ðˁiib | non-word |
ðuub | ‘you melt’ | ðˁuub | non-word |
ðaab | ‘melted’ | ðˁaab | non-word |
diib | non-word | dˁiib | non-word |
duub | non-word | dˁuub | non-word |
daab | non-word | dˁaab | non-word |
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