Airflow and duration patterns in Tunisian Arabic fricatives.

Airflow and duration patterns in Tunisian Arabic fricatives were examined in data from six male speakers. TA is conventionally described as having eight fricative phonemes, five voiceless (labio-dental, alveolar, uvular, pharyngeal and “glottal”) and three voiced (dental, alveolar, and pharyngeal). These segments occur as singletons and geminates. Tokens of both types were collected in word-medial position following an initial /Ca/ sequence, where C is a single stop and /a/ a short low back vowel. Duration of this vowel preceding singleton and geminate fricatives was compared with its duration preceding a medial fricative + consonant (/FC/) cluster, where a syllable boundary is assumed to occur between /F/ and /C/ (e.g., /kafara, kaffara, kafra/). Vowel duration before the geminate is similar to that observed before the cluster, arguing for a syllable boundary within the geminate. However, airflow patterns do not suggest that any “re-articulation” occurs during the geminate constriction [unlike in French pseudo-geminates, Smith (1996)]. Airflow shows the expected elevation at the transitions between vowel and fricative and a single low trough during the constriction, except for /h/. Because there is no supraglottal constriction, /h/ has peak airflow near the center of its duration. Thus /h/ does not pattern with other “gutturals.”