Durational features of Arabic tone units by Native and Nonnative Speakers

This paper examines the durational characteristics of tone groups in Cairene Arabic (CA) as produced by
both native and nonnative speakers. It begins with a discussion of relevant perspectives on the temporal
features of language and the relationship between tone groups and duration in CA. An experiment was
conducted to assess the role of duration in the intonation of utterances derived from natural CA speech
recorded by native CA and nonnative (Mandarin) speakers. The study evaluates the proficiency of
nonnative (Mandarin Chinese) speakers in producing these utterances in comparison to native CA
speakers. It specifically analyzes the durational aspects of tone groups in the speech of two native Arabic
speakers, one female and one male) and how stress time is mirrored in the structural characteristics of
tone groups i.e. stressed segment durations. The identical words were recorded as produced by two (one
female and one male) MC speakers of Arabic. The temporal characteristics of the tone groupings in the
recorded utterances were compared generally. Several tone groups were subjected to instrumental
measurements of the overall tone group durations using Praat (Boersma, P.Weenink, D.2006).The
durations of the same tone groups produced by native speakers and nonnative speakers of CA differed
significantly, according to the results.This implies that nonnative speakers' production of CA (a language
that is believed to be stress-timed) utterances was clearly influenced by the syllable timing that is said to
dominate Mandarin.These results should be valuable in verifying the validity of the overall assertion of
stress-timing vs.syllable-timing in languages.