Arabic Emphatics: The Evidence for Cultural Determinants of Phonetic Sex-Typing

Abstract Two studies compare men’s and women’s production of Arabic emphatics (pharyngealized consonants). The results of the first study with native speakers of Cairene Arabic indicate that women show significantly less acoustic differentiation between emphatic and nonemphatic segments. The results of the second study show that while Arab men and women differ significantly in their production of emphatics, American men and women who have been taught Arabic by male speakers are much more similar to each other in the pronunciation of emphatics. Among Arabs, the magnitude difference in formant frequencies between men and women was found to be much greater than anatomically predicted by FANT and the direction of the sex-related formant differences was opposite to FANT’s predictions. The results of these two experiments point toward nonphysiological bases of variation in vowel formants for men and women.