Perception of Moroccan Arabic geminates by native English speakers.

Adult listeners often have difficulty perceiving phonetic distinctions that are not contrastive in their native language (e.g., Lisker and Abramson 1970, Miyawaki et al. 1975, Trehub 1976, MacKain et al. 1980, Werker et al. 1981, among others). However, the same contrast may be perceived with more or less difficulty depending on the environment in which it is embedded. This study investigated the perception of geminate consonants in Moroccan Arabic by native English speakers who had not had previous exposure to the geminate-singleton contrast. The geminates [ss] and [zz] were paired with singleton counterparts in four different environments: medial-intervocalic ([assa]-[asa], [azza]-[aza]); medial-consonant-adjacent ([assta]-[asta], [azzda]-[azda]); initial-vowel-adjacent ([ssa]-[sa], [zza]-[za]); and initial-consonant-adjacent ([ssta]-[sta], [zzda-[zda]]). The words were recorded by a native Moroccan Arabic speaker, and subsequently used as stimuli in a perception experiment (AX discrimination task; 80 participants). The sensitivity to the geminate-singleton contrast was measured by calculating A-prime scores (Grier 1971) and performing an ANOVA. The analysis showed a significant main effect of environment [F(3,237)=28.7; p<0.001]. The participants performed above chance, and their perception of the geminate-singleton contrast was best in the medial-intervocalic environment (A′=0.83), worse in the medial-consonant-adjacent (A′=0.73) and initial-vowel-adjacent environments (A′=0.74), and worst in the initial-consonant-adjacent context (A′=0.58).