| Research Abstract |
The aim of our research is to investigate, linguistically and phonetically, the geminate consonants of Moroccan Arabic.
Moroccan Arabic has consonantal geminates like Japanese, which are "soku'on" and some allophones of "hatsu'on". However, they are different on the point that they appear in the word-initial and the word-final positions. We travelled in Morocco and asked four Moroccan speakers, and gathered their speech sounds.
We analyzed phonemically their speech sounds, and made phonetic transcriptions. We analyzed geminate consonants using sound-spectrograph, and measured the durations.
The results are as follows: in Moroccan Arabic,
1) Almost all the consonants can make geminate consonants,
2) Phonemically, every geminate consonant can appear in the word-initial, word-intermediate, word-final positions,
3) In the word-initial position, geminate consonants that are durative, such as fricatives, nasals, etc., are longer than singleton consonants,
4) In the word-initial position, geminate consonants that are NOT durative, such as plosives, and affricates, are almost the same duration as singleton consonants,
5) Therefore, NOT all phonemic geminate consonants are phonetic geminate consonants.
Now we are making further analysis on the geminate consonants in the word-intermediate position, and in the word-final position. In the word-intermediate position, the geminate consonants that are not durative can lengthen their closure duration, like "soku'on" in Japanese, so, the opposition between geminates and singletons are NOT neutralized.
We must make further investigation on the acoustic cues of geminate consonants in the word-initial position, and we must experiment with another method such as perceptual experiment.
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