Mohammad Abuoudeh

This study examines the impact of changes in two speaking styles –story reading vs. storytelling– on the spectral and temporal properties of long and short vowels in Jordanian Arabic. The transition from one register to another may generate temporal spectral modifications. This is why a particular interest has been paid to the behavior of long and short vowels in the context of these two types of variations. Ten speakers of Jordanian Arabic read and then narrated the same short story. Contrary to what was expected, spectral and temporal vowel properties were not influenced by the change in speaking style. These results indicate that in Jordanian Arabic, the transition from one register to the other had little impact on vowel quality and quantity. However, the conditions under scrutiny in this study may be too close to one another to enable such expected differences to emerge. Additional components of the currently collected corpus may be more appropriate to let differences between controlled and more spontaneous speech styles be revealed.

This study examines the impact of changes in two speaking styles –story reading vs. storytelling– on the spectral and temporal properties of long and short vowels in Jordanian Arabic. Reading a text is usually associated with formal or clear speech, whereas storytelling is more spontaneous. The transition from one register to another may generate temporal and spectral modifications. This is why a particular interest has been paid to the behavior of long and short vowels in the context of these two speaking conditions. Ten speakers of Jordanian Arabic read then narrated the same short story. Contrary to what was expected, spectral and temporal vowel properties were not influenced by changes in speaking style. These results indicate that in this experiment, the transition from one register to the other had little impact on vowel quality and quantity. However, the conditions under scrutiny in this study may be too close to one another in order to enable such differences to emerge. Additional components of the currently collected corpus may be more appropriate to let differences between controlled and more spontaneous speech styles be revealed.

This article examines the nature of phonological deficits in French persons with aphasia through the prism of the notion of phonological complexity. While there is a plethora of studies devoted to phonetic errors concerning the realization of phonemes, there are fewer studies that take into account the phonological dimension, i.e. the contextual environment. Yet, some authors show that the syllabic structure of the word, or the position of segments within syllables, influences the realization of persons with aphasia. These factors refer to the notion of phonological complexity. This study presents an analysis of phonological errors in French aphasia based on a corpus of empirical data collected from eight participants. The aim is to examine several factors of phonological complexity to see if they are correlated with error production. The hypothesis is that the presence of consonant sequences, the position of these sequences in the items (initial vs. medial), the nature of these sequences (heterosyllabic, tautosyllabic), as well as the length of the items (bi vs. trisyllabic) influence error production. Through this research, we hope to increase knowledge about the nature of phonological deficits.

Temporal variations associated with the realisation of vowels can be intrinsic, such as the phonological length opposition, and extrinsic as occurs in speaking rate variations. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of these two types of temporal variations on the spectral and temporal realisations of vowels that contrast in vowel length when they are combined in the same consonantal context. Two speakers of Jordanian Arabic produced CVC words that contain long and short vowels in three different speaking rates (slow, normal and fast). The results indicate that changes in speaking rate lead to temporal overlap between the duration of long and short vowels. In addition, an important spectral overlap is noticed in the F1-F2 plan and it reaches a maximum when long and short vowels are pronounced at fast speaking rates. These results suggest that spectral changes associated with extrinsic temporal variations create difficulties in the statistical discrimination and, potentially, the perceptiual differenciation between long and short vowels. Linear discriminant analysis were designed to explore the different factors that might balance the loss of information caused by these temporal variations.

This study compares the production of primary stressed (PS) and unstressed reduced (UR) syllables in English by a group of Jordanian English speakers and native English speakers along the dimensions of vowel quality (F1&F2), vowel duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity. The participants were six advanced undergraduate Jordanian learners of English at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University and two native American-born speakers. Data were collected and analyzed using Praat (2019) speech analysis software. The results show differences between the two groups in the acoustic features of vowel production and reveal that native language (L1) transfer was one of the main reasons for the deviation from native- like production.

This aims at examining the different spectral variations that are produced by two types of vowel time variations : phonological vowel length opposition and differing speaking rates. Two experiments on Jordanian Arabic and on French were conducted to investigate this phenomenon. We were interested in stop consonants produced in the initial position in CVC sequences. Vowel duration and the frequency of the first three formants were measured for each vowel length / speech rate. In addition, locus equations were computed to measure the impact of time variations on CV coarticulation.According to our results, it seems that both vowel length opposition and speaking rates had an impact on consonant and voyelle quality as well as on CV coarticulation. For the two time variation types, when the time decreases (more coarticulation overlap) locus equation slopes tend to have higher values.

Investigations of changes in speech rate and speaking style have reported that locus equation parameters are sensible to temporal variation though they usually do not evidence any major impact on place of articulation classification. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of vowel length contrasts on locus equation parameters in Jordanian Arabic (JA) speech production in order to study the influence of intrinsic temporal changes (vowel length contrasts) on locus equation parameters. Statistical analyses of slopes and intercepts show that the locus equation parameters of a consonant produced with long vowels are significantly different from those of the same consonant produced with short vowels. Though this obsevation confirms the impact of time variations on locus equations, further analyses will need to address issues related to the potential impact of duration-related spectral modifications and the role these changes may play on the perceptual categorization of consonantal place of articulation.

Locus equations are a model of Consonant-Vowel relationships based on an abstraction of the temporal dimension of speech. They focus on the relation between acoustic frequencies issued from two speech “segments”. In this communiation, we argue that this hypothesis is erroneous and provide data from an experiment in which the importance of the time dimension on the computation of locus equations was investigated. We have recorded Consonant-Vowel sequences produced in a fixed setence context by 4 Jordanian Arabic speakers and compared locus equations parameters between long and short vowels for 5 unvoiced stops. According to our analyses, there is a significant impact of vowel length on locus equations, which provides arguments against the non-continuous bases of locus equations parameters in terms of place of articulation, though more thouroughfull analyses are needed in order to get a better understanding of these effects.