Voicing contrasts in the singleton stops of Palestinian Arabic: Production and perception

This study investigates the stop voicing contrast in Palestinian Arabic (PA) by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) in both production and perception. An acoustic analysis of the recordings of 8 speakers showed that word-initial voiced stops in sentence context have an average VOT of -93 msec, and word-initial voiceless stops one of 29 msec. PA thus belongs, like most dialects of Arabic, to true voicing languages, i.e., languages with a contrast between voicing lead and short lag VOT.
We furthermore tested whether the phoneme /b/, without voiceless counterpart /p/ in PA, has similar VOT values to /d, dʕ/, which have voiceless counterparts /t, tʕ/. Similarly, we compared /k/, without counterpart /g/ in the PA dialect we investigated, to /t, tʕ/. For /b/ we found very similar VOT values to /d, dʕ/, while for /k/ we found a difference to /t, tʕ/, attributable to a general tendency of velars to have longer VOT than denti- alveolars. We thus found no evidence for a less contrastive realization of unpaired plosives in PA.
In a categorization experiment of the denti-alveolar phoneme pairs with the same 8 speakers, VOT proved sufficient as a perceptual cue, though f0 of the following vowel also influenced the categorization.