An Acoustic Measurements of English Stops Produced by Native Yemeni Arabic Speakers of English (NYASE)

Abstract

Acoustically, this paper investigates English stops consonants as produced by NYASE. The researcher examines the voicing of six stops by the use of Voice Onset Time (henceforth VOT) method. This inquiry aims to identify how similar/different the VOT patterns produced by NYASE to the VOT-literature-based patterns produced by native speakers of English. The subjects of this study are two Yemeni adults doing their Ph.D. at Annamalai University, Center of Advanced Study in Linguistics. They were chosen based on a self-evaluation test. Those subjects who evaluated themselves as having an ‘excellent’ command over English were selected to participate in this study. Knowingly, the subjects are late bilinguals, who learned English in their adulthood. Later on, the targeted sounds in word-initial position, pre-vocalically, in monosyllabic words, and in their citation form, have been recorded and analyzed following Lisker and Abramson (1964) procedures. Wide-band spectrograms cross-checked with waveforms were made, and from them, VOT was measured by ‘marking off the interval between the release of the stop and the onset of voicing’. The acoustic measurements showed that NYASE produce long lag VOT patterns for voiceless stop, long lead VOT patterns for voiced ones.