Coda (de)voicing across morpheme boundaries in Rural Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much work on phonetic assimilation in Arabic has focused on the assimilation of the definite article. However, assimilation across morpheme boundaries has been less of a target of study. Our research, based on word-list data comprising 57 words uttered by 12 native speakers of RJA, revealed that F1 and vowel duration were robust acoustic correlates in discriminating voiced from voiceless consonants. Results further showed that morpheme boundaries are important loci of assimilation: /t/ undergoes voicing assimilation when followed by a voiced obstruent at a morpheme boundary, whereas voiced obstruents devoice before /h/ at the morpheme boundary as compared to the word boundary. This morpheme-boundary voicing assimilation is notably different from assimilation across word boundaries.