CAN VOICE ONSET TIME EXPLAIN VOWEL DURATION VARIATION?

Authors

  • Ziyad R. Kasim Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Mosul, Iraq

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25007/ajnu.v8n4a476

Keywords:

Arabic, stops, vot, vowel duration

Abstract

Vowel durations have been reported in many languages to vary before syllable final stops; these durations are shorter before voiceless stops and longer before voiced ones. One type of explanations to this phenomenon suggests prevocalic effect influencing vowel duration variation. The present study attempts at a preliminary investigation to find out whether the voice onset time (VOT) of a syllable initial stop can be correlated with this vowel duration variation in a CVC context in Arabic. Measurements of the VOT of the Arabic voiceless uvular stop /q/ are made where /q/ is the first C, V is one of /a:/, /u:/ and /i:/ and the final C is either /t/ or /d/. A Paired-Samples T-Test is used to compare between the VOT measurements of /q/ of the words containing /t/ and those containing /d/. The result of the comparison did not show any significant difference; no relationship could be found between the VOT of the initial stop and vowel duration variation.

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References

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Published

2019-12-20

How to Cite

Kasim, Z. R. (2019). CAN VOICE ONSET TIME EXPLAIN VOWEL DURATION VARIATION?. Academic Journal of Nawroz University, 8(4), 311–315. https://doi.org/10.25007/ajnu.v8n4a476

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Articles