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Word-level stress assignment in urban Hijazi Arabic. A diactric "ˈ" indicates the stress location, a dot indicates a syllable boundary and PL stands for plural.
Source publication
Prosodic encoding of focus in Taifi Arabic is not yet fully understood. A recent production study found significant acoustic differences between syntactically identical sentences with information focus, contrastive focus and without focus. This paper presents results from a production experiment investigating whether information and contrastive foc...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... 'urban' Hijazi Arabic, stress falls on a final syllable if it is superheavy (CVVC or CVCC), else on a heavy penultimate (CVV or CVC) (Abaalkhail, 1998). The stress assignment rules are summerized in Table 1 below. (2) and (3), the information-and contrastive-focused item are realized in-situ, and hence, it may indicate that prosodic instruments can be used by the speakers of Taifi Arabic to encode focus. ...Similar publications
This paper investigates the domain and directionality of emphasis spread in Urban Jordanian Arabic. The acoustic coarticulatory effects of emphasis are also probed. Nine native speakers of the dialect were recorded reading tri-syllabic monomorphemic and bimorphemic minimal pairs. The minimal pairs contained the voiceless emphatic fricative/sˁ/and i...
Citations
... Broad Focus (BF), (narrow) Informational Focus (IF), and (narrow) Contrastive Focus (CF). This method was adopted in a considerable number of prior studies on prosodic focus (including, but not limited to, Chahal, 2001;Xu & Xu, 2005;Alzaidi, 2014;Moussa, 2019;El Zarka et al., 2020;Alzaidi, 2022). In addition, the researcher read contextual information to the participants, offering them a clear understanding of the background to generate accurate and natural responses (Jun & Fletcher, 2014). ...
... Arabic, Yemeni Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, Jeddah Arabic, and Taifi Arabic (Chahal, 2001;Hellmuth, 2006;Chahal & Hellmuth, 2014;Yeou et al., 2007;Bouchhioua, 2009;Moussa, 2019;Alzaidi, 2022 of the first one which was supposed to be the stressed syllable in the word. They further noticed that there were two instances of F0 movement at the level of this word where F0 decreased to a minimum point before successively rising to the second peak in the following syllable. ...
... Arabic, Yemeni Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, Jeddah Arabic, and Taifi Arabic (Chahal, 2001;Hellmuth, 2006;Chahal & Hellmuth, 2014;Yeou et al., 2007;Bouchhioua, 2009;Moussa, 2019;Alzaidi, 2022). It is worth noting, however, that higher F0 peak was only used by the speakers of this dialect to mark narrow focus in the initial-sentential position, indicating thus its weakness to stand as a phonetic cue for focus encoding. ...
The present study attempted to experimentally analyze the intonational patterns realized by male and female speakers of Algerian Arabic as spoken in Oran, within the Autosegmental-metrical theory. Particularly, it was established on the basis of a threefold aim: (1) to examine the tonal inventory and tunes makeup in this variety; (2) to probe the ways intonation contributes to the phonological and phonetic marking of narrow focus structure (Informational Focus and Contrastive Focus) and broad focus structure; and (3) to investigate any potential gender-related intonational variation in Oran speech community apropos of tonal configuration, prosodic focus encoding, and pitch range realization within different types of tunes. To this end, a select group of adult speakers of this dialect were recorded during the production of controlled and semi-controlled speech material. The experimental analysis of the F0 contour revealed that this dialect demonstrated a rich tonal inventory which brought about the composition of several tunes with distinct pragmatic meanings. Besides, both qualitative and quantitative results exhibited that intonation served as an integral part in encoding focus structure and distinguishing between narrow focus and broad focus through on-focus phonetic enhancement and post-focus compression. Ultimately, the results of the sociophonetic scrutinization underpinned the already-established assumption which stipulates that intonation does mirror the speaker’s gender identity.
Keywords: intonation, Algerian Oran Spoken Arabic, Autosegmental-metrical theory, prosodic focus, gender, pitch range, acoustic analysis
... With regard to Arabic, there have been a number of studies on prosodic focus in some of the dialects such as Egyptian Arabic (Norlin, 1989;Rifaat, 2005;Hellmuth, 2006b;Hellmuth, 2007;Hellmuth, 2009;Chahal & Hellmuth, 2014;Cangemi, El Zarka, Wehrle, Baumann, & Grice, 2016;El Zarka, Schuppler, & Cangemi, 2019;El Zarka, Kelterer, & Schuppler, 2020;El Zarka & Hödl, 2021), Hijazi (Alzaidi et al., 2019;Alzaidi, 2021a;Alzaidi, 2021b), Lebanese (Chahal, 1999;Chahal, 2003;Chahal & Hellmuth, 2014), Makkan Arabic (Alzaidi, 2022), Moroccan (Benkirane, 1998;Yeou, Embarki, & Al-Maqtari, 2007;Burdin et al., 2015), Yemeni and Kuwaiti Arabic (Yeou et al., 2007). These studies differ in terms of the acoustic cues examined and the nature of the test materials used. ...
... With regard to Arabic, there have been a number of studies on prosodic focus in some of the dialects such as Egyptian Arabic (Norlin, 1989;Rifaat, 2005;Hellmuth, 2006b;Hellmuth, 2007;Hellmuth, 2009;Chahal & Hellmuth, 2014;Cangemi, El Zarka, Wehrle, Baumann, & Grice, 2016;El Zarka, Schuppler, & Cangemi, 2019;El Zarka, Kelterer, & Schuppler, 2020;El Zarka & Hödl, 2021), Hijazi (Alzaidi et al., 2019;Alzaidi, 2021a;Alzaidi, 2021b), Lebanese (Chahal, 1999;Chahal, 2003;Chahal & Hellmuth, 2014), Makkan Arabic (Alzaidi, 2022), Moroccan (Benkirane, 1998;Yeou, Embarki, & Al-Maqtari, 2007;Burdin et al., 2015), Yemeni and Kuwaiti Arabic (Yeou et al., 2007). These studies differ in terms of the acoustic cues examined and the nature of the test materials used. ...
This study is a preliminary investigation of intonation in Emirati Arabic (EA) (an under-researched Arabic dialect), using systematic acoustic analysis and computational modelling. First, we investigated the prosodic realisation of information focus and contrastive focus at sentence-initial, -penultimate and -final positions. The analysis of 1980 EA utterances produced by eleven EA native speakers revealed that (1) in focused words, only contrastive focus is realised with expanded excursion size, longer duration, and stronger intensity relative to their neutral focus counterparts, (2) post-focus words have a lower f0 and weaker intensity in both contrastive focus and information focus, and (3) pre-focus words have compressed excursion size and relatively short duration. We then used computational modelling to test how much of the EA intonation could be captured by the PENTA model, with focus-defined functional categories and a number of other, putative categories. PENTAtrainer was trained on syllable-sized multi-functional targets from a subset of the production data. The model then generated f0 contours with the learned targets and imposed them on resynthesised speech for perceptual evaluation. A comparison of the model-generated f0 contours with the natural f0 contours showed that not only focus but also weight, stress, position of word-level stressed syllable and prosodic word are important factors determining the fine details of EA intonation. A perceptual test with native EA listeners showed that the synthetic EA f0 contours sounded nearly as natural as the original intonation, and could convey focus nearly as accurately as natural intonation.
