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Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143

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Journal of Phonetics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phonetics

Acoustic differences between lexical and epenthetic vowels in Lebanese Arabic

Nancy Hall n

California State University Long Beach, 1250 Bellﬂower Blvd, Department of Linguistics (PSY 114), CSULB, Long Beach, CA 90840, United States

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Article history: Traditionally, epenthetic vowels in Lebanese Arabic are transcribed [i], and are assumed to be acoustically Received 23 November 2011 indistinguishable from lexical [i]. A production experiment ﬁnds variation among speakers: some do produce Received in revised form the vowels identically, others produce a schwa-like epenthetic vowel that is categorically distinct from lexical 6 September 2012 [i], and others produce clouds of epenthetic and lexical vowel tokens that partially overlap. Accepted 13 December 2012 & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Levantine vowel epenthesis: In colloquial Levantine Arabic dialects (spoken in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), underlying consonant clusters are frequently broken up by epenthetic vowels. Epenthesis is possible in CCC and word-ﬁnal CC clusters, but only the latter are examined in this study. For many clusters, epenthesis is optional, and it is common for a speaker to produce the same word" sometimes with epenthesis and sometimes without. For example, ‘girl’, historically and underlyingly /bint/, can be pronounced either [bint] or ½ binit in Lebanese.1 This process receives much attention in the phonological literature because of its complex, often opaque interactions with other phonological processes. For example, Levantine dialects normally stress a CVC penult, as in (1a), but not if it contains an epenthetic vowel, as in (1b). The pattern can most easily be described through rule ordering, as shown here.

a. ‘we wrote’ b. ‘our clothing’ /katab-na/" " /libs-na/ (1) Stress ka: tab:na "libs:na Epenthesis - - - li:bis:na " " [ka: tab:na] [ li:bis:na]

Similar opaque interactions occur between epenthesis and other processes. For example, there is a vowel shortening pattern that affects CV:CC words; in the derivation =ja bÀP=-jabP-½jabÀiP ‘he didn’t bring’, epenthesis counter-bleeds shortening. Because opacity is challenging for standard Optimality Theory, currently the dominant phonological framework, Levantine epenthesis is often cited in arguments for alternative frameworks such as Stratal Optimality Theory (Kiparsky, 2003), Optimality Theory with candidate chains (McCarthy, 2007), and Harmonic Serialism. Also, in any phonological framework, it is a challenge to explain how opaque interactions are acquired: Alderete and Tesar (2002) point out that Arabic’s surface stress irregularities could mislead speakers into positing a lexical stress pattern. However, there has been little study of the phonetic characteristics of the epenthetic vowels. According to impressionistic descriptions, the quality of the epenthetic vowel varies within the Levant, from [ ] in Damascus (Cowell, 2005, p. 29) to [e] in Palestine (Elihay, 2004) to [i] in Lebanon (Haddad, 1984). It is usually described as being phonetically identical to one of the short lexical vowels in the same dialect. The inventory of lexical vowels also varies within the region: every Levantine dialect contrasts at least short [a i u], although there are few [i/u] minimal pairs; some dialects also have phonemic [e] and [o], and some additionally have [ ]. According to Cowell (2005, p. 13), the pairs [e/i] and [o/u] never contrast before a single word-ﬁnal C (the environment that will be examined in this experiment), and [ ] is rarely contrastive in general. For all dialects, the short vowels are phonetically more centralized than the traditional transcriptions (used here) would imply.

n Tel.: +1 562 985 2656. E-mail address: [email protected] 1 Throughout this paper, epenthetic vowels will be underlined for clarity.

134 N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143

Table 1 Underlying forms of paired target items.

Environment Words with epenthesis Words with underlying /i/

b_l (1) /Pibl/ ‘lion cub’ /dibil/ ‘withered’ b_l (2) /

In the case of Lebanese, phonological descriptions by native speakers (Haddad, 1983, 1984; Abdul-Karim, 1980) use the symbol [i] for both epenthetic and" lexical high front vowels, so that underlyingly different words like /libs/ ‘clothes’ and /libis/ ‘wore’ are transcribed as if pronounced identically, as [ libis]. However, some descriptions of Levantine dialects suggest that epenthetic and lexical vowels differ in duration or in other ways. According to Elihay (2004, 12), the epenthetic [e] of Palestinian is ‘‘the same as [lexical e], or even shorter.’’ Similarly, Haddad (1984, 37) reports of Beiruti speech: ‘‘I have often represented the epenthetic vowel as /i/. This is done only for typographical purposes. In some cases, however, this representation is rather inadequate since the epenthetic vowel is often very short as compared to an underlying /i/. Moreover, an epenthetic vowel is more easily prone to suprasegmental features such as [guttural]...and emphasis...which considerably alter its quality.’’ In a small-scale instrumental study, Gouskova and Hall (2009) found that some speakers of Lebanese differentiate epenthetic and lexical vowels in production. The epenthetic vowels in words like [libis] ‘clothes’ were significantly shorter in duration and lower in F2 than the corresponding lexical vowels in words like [libis] ‘wore’. There was also a non-significant trend towards higher F1 in epenthetic vowels. However, not all speakers produced a difference; for some, the vowels were identical. The present study builds on Gouskova and Hall (2009), by comparing epenthetic and lexical vowels across a larger number of speakers and items, and with a refined elicitation methodology. It largely confirms the previous results, and adds new details as to how speakers vary from one another.

2. Method

Materials: Fifteen pairs of words were elicited, as shown in Table 1. Each pair consisted of a /CiCiC/ verb and a /CiCC/ noun, which according to standard descriptions of Lebanese should be realized as [CiCiC] with epenthesis. The experiment was designed to compare the second syllable vowels, although first syllable vowels were subsequently analyzed as well. Both verb and noun are unsuffixed, to avoid any possible effect of morpheme boundaries. The use of different parts of speech is unavoidable; Lebanese has a templatic morphology in which each part of speech corresponds to a limited number of shapes. " Seven of the" pairs are true minimal pairs. For five of these, both members of the pair are based on the same triconsonantal" root (e.g., [ libis] ‘clothes’" vs. [ libis] ‘wore’); the other two minimal pairs are based on homophonous but semantically unrelated roots (e.g., [ misik] ‘musk’ vs. [ misik] ‘held’). The remaining eight pairs are near-minimal pairs, in which only the word-initial consonant is different. This difference is not expected to affect the vowel in the second syllable. In all words, stress is on the first syllable. None of the words contain pharyngeal or ‘emphatic’ consonants, to avoid the effects these consonants may have on vowel quality.2,3 It was expected that each speaker would produce only a subset of the pairs in usable form. There are two reasons for this. First, vowel epenthesis is optional. If a speaker did not epenthesize in a particular /CiCC/ word, that pair was discarded. Second, many Lebanese words have variant lexical forms, even for speakers from similar demographic backgrounds. In many /CVCC/ nouns, the lexical vowel varies between /a/, /i/, and /u/, and many /CVCVC/ verbs vary between /CaCaC/ and /CiCiC/. So, for example, ‘riding (n.)’ can be [rikib] or [rakib], and ‘adopted’ can be [kifil] or [kafal]. If either member of a pair was produced with a lexical vowel other than /i/, the pair was discarded. Elicitation: The phonetic study of colloquial Arabic presents certain methodological problems not found in most languages, and the method of elicitation was designed to deal with these. First, most Arabic speakers have some knowledge of non-colloquial registers that I will refer to collectively as ‘Standard Arabic’ (there is actually more than one non-colloquial register, but further differentiation is not important here). Since Standard Arabic has no epenthesis in final CC, it was essential that speakers not produce standard forms. This can be difficult to ensure. Because Standard Arabic is widely used in formal settings related to education, religion, and the media, the relatively formal situation of being recorded in a laboratory is likely to influence speakers to switch to the standard register. Gouskova and Hall (2009) found that some speakers who had epenthesized freely in a casual setting avoided epenthesis when being recorded.

2 Two additional word pairs were recorded but discarded. In each pair, one member contained /x/ in word-initial position, and some speakers produced this /x/ as emphatic (that is, pharyngealized). Arabic dialects differ as to whether /x/ is emphatic (Herzallah, 1990, 42–43). 3 Although /r/ can be emphatic in some contexts, it loses emphasis in words containing /i/ (Herzallah, 1990, p. 106–109). Author's personal copy

N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143 135

The use of written stimuli exacerbates the problem. Most Arabic writing is in the standard register and hence reading aloud is associated with standard pronunciations. Yet it is not easy to avoid the use of written stimuli, given that some of the words to be elicited are rather infrequent or have non-concrete meanings, and that all the words need to be in a speciﬁc morphological form. Another problem with written stimuli is that many orthographic forms are ambiguous out of context, largely because short vowels are not normally written. Minimal pairs like /libs/ ‘clothes’ and /libis/ ‘wore’ are written identically. The lexical items can be disambiguated by using optional diacritics indicating the (underlying) presence or absence of the second vowel, but this would be understood as an instruction not to pronounce the epenthetic vowel. To minimize these methodological problems, the present experiment used a method of elicitation that combined audio and written stimuli. Sitting in a quiet room, speakers viewed a self-paced Powerpoint presentation on a laptop computer. Each slide displayed a target word above a set of four frame sentences in which the speaker was to pronounce the word. Simultaneously with seeing the written word, speakers heard an audio recording of a female native Lebanese speaker (from Beirut, aged around 25) saying a ‘presentation sentence’ in colloquial Lebanese containing the target word, usually in sentence-medial position. The target word itself was excised from the audio recording and replaced with 400 ms of white noise, so as not to provide a model for pronunciation. For example, the word [ridim] ‘debris’ was elicited using the visual and audio stimuli in (2):

Visual stimulus: (Translation) Debris (2) _____ Say _____ once _____ Say _____ twice _____ Say _____ three times

_____ Say _____ four times

Audio stimulus: iPPaUi le rafa2u [white noise] min itt2ari < ‘‘The workers removed (the) [white noise] from the street.’’

Hearing these audio recordings of colloquial speech throughout the experiment helped speakers to stay in the colloquial register, as well as providing a context to disambiguate homographic words. The written stimuli helped ensure that speakers chose the correct word, as opposed to other words that might semantically fit in the context. The target word was written without vowels (as is normal in Arabic orthography), and, in some cases, in a non-standard colloquial spelling. For example, the word ‘accepted’ is normally written as (q-b-l) reflecting its classical pronunciation [qabila], but in the experiment it was written as ð<Àb À lÞ reflecting its colloquial pronunciation [

(3) Frame sentences ﬁrst block second block < u:l_____y ‘Say_____...’

Many words in the frames are distinctively colloquial, to help speakers stay in the colloquial register. Speakers were asked to imagine that they were a director giving directions to actors in a particular Lebanese soap opera that uses colloquial speech, and were explicitly told not to vary their own speech rate or style. Nevertheless, a few speakers did slow down on the sentence containing the word ‘‘slowly’’. The 34 target words (including the four later discarded) were mixed with 50 filler items, all of which contained words of forms other than /CVCVC/ or /CVCC/. The order of presentation was pseudo-randomized so that each /CiCC/ item was a minimum of 20 items away from its /CiCiC/ match. Speakers’ reading was recorded as .WAV files with a Marantz PMD 660 solid state recorder and a Shure PG180 microphone. Speakers: Twenty-two speakers (13 female, nine male, with a mean age of 24) were recruited in Southern California. Speakers were required to be native speakers of Lebanese, to have lived at least 5 years in Lebanon, to be literate in Arabic, and to speak Lebanese Arabic in their day- to-day life in America. As Southern California has a large Lebanese community with its own religious, cultural, and media institutions, many immigrants continue to be active speakers of their mother tongue, reducing the extent of L1 attrition. In addition, a number of the speakers reported making frequent summer trips to Lebanon. Participants were informally evaluated by a native speaker of Arabic for their proficiency. Speakers’ backgrounds are summarized in Table 2. W means female; M means male. Some speakers were born to Lebanese parents living abroad and moved to Lebanon later, but these speakers reported that they spoke only Lebanese at home as children and considered it their mother tongue. Author's personal copy

136 N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143

Table 2 Speaker demographics.

Speaker Age City of origin Age lived in Leb. Religion

W1 24 Beirut 0–8 Sunni W2 23 Beirut 0–6 Sunni W3 21 Tripoli 0–12 Muslim (unspeciﬁed) W4 22 Beirut 5–11 Sunni W5 22 Tripoli 0–16 Sunni W6 23 Tripoli 0–17 Sunni W7 18 Tripoli 0–12 Sunni W8 17 Tripoli 0–11 Sunni W9 48 Tripoli 0–42 Sunni W10 21 Zahle 5–17 Catholic W11 22 Jdita 7–21 Sunni W12 34 Zahle 0–23 Shiite W13 20 Khalde/Al Chouf 2–9 Druze M1 22 Beirut 2–11 Sunni M2 22 Beirut 6–12 Sunni M3 28 Tripoli 0–2, 11–15 Sunni M4 19 Jdita 4–19 Sunni M5 27 Hammana/Beirut 0–18 Greek orthodox M6 27 Beirut 0–18 Armenian orthodox M7 23 Sur 0–19 Muslim (unspeciﬁed) M8 21 Bchamoun/Btater 4–11 Druze M9 22 Tripoli 0–19 Catholic

W5, W6, W7, W8, and W9 are a nuclear family; W11 and M4 are siblings; W1, W2, W4, M1, and M2 are cousins; M8 and W13 are cousins.

Measurements: Recordings were listened to by a native Arabic speaker to determine whether each word was produced in usable form, and whether the full frame sentence was produced correctly and fluently, without significant pausing. Tokens not meeting these criteria were discarded. Having a native speaker confirm that the epenthetic vowels are present guards against the danger of accidentally counting phonetic transitions between consonants (intrusive vowels, in the sense of Hall, 2006) that might have vocalic characteristics on a spectrogram yet not be considered vowel segments by native speakers.4 For usable tokens, the beginning and end of each second-syllable vowel was marked in a Praat textgrid (Boersma & Weenink, 2009). To avoid experimenter bias, the vowel boundaries were marked by a second research assistant, who was not told the purpose of the experiment and does not speak Arabic. Boundaries with obstruents were marked at the onset or offset of modal voicing; in cases where modal voicing occurred during the obstruent (as often happened with /b/, for example), the boundary was marked at the point of a sharp change in intensity. Lebanese [r] tends to be phonetically obstruent-like, often appearing fricated, and hence the same criterion was used for boundaries with [r]. Boundaries with [l] or [m] were marked based on a change in intensity. A few tokens that could not be confidently segmented were discarded. Formant values at the vowel midpoint and duration values were collected with a Praat script.5 Tokens with outlying formant values were visually checked, and if a formant had been mistracked, measurements were taken manually. A Perl script was used to pair lexical and epenthetic tokens by speaker and repetition. For example, speaker W1’s fifth repetition of /libs/ could be paired only with her fifth repetition of /libis/. Tokens that had no usable match were discarded. Out of the 2640 pairs of tokens collected (15 pairs Â 8 repetitions Â 22 speakers), 1164 pairs were produced in usable form, and these form the basis of the analysis that follows, except where noted. Each speaker produced between 19 and 93 usable pairs; for an exact breakdown, see Table 6. The number of pairs produced by each speaker is the degrees of freedom plus one.

3. Results

3.1. Epenthesis rates

Epenthesis rates were generally high, both across speakers and across items, suggesting that the experiment was successful in eliciting speech in a colloquial register. One unforeseen result was that speakers occasionally produced sandhi epenthesis, placing the epenthetic vowel after rather than within the word-ﬁnal cluster. This happened particularly when the following word in the frame sentence began with a consonant cluster: for example, [

4 My impression is that when Levantine speakers try to produce classical forms with CC codas, especially those with rising sonority as in [PuUl] ‘work’, there is sometimes a transitional vocoid, so that the word sounds like [PuU l]. Native speakers, however, seem ﬁrm in their judgment that no vowel is present. 5 The script was written by Katherine Crosswhite. Author's personal copy

N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143 137

Table 3 Epenthesis rate by item.

Obstruent–sonorant Obstruent–obstruent Sonorant–obstruent Sonorant–sonorant

/ridm/ 100% /kizb/ 97% /Pirb/ 95% /ﬁlm/ 50% /kiﬂ/ 100% /rikb/ 94% / ild/ 88% /

Tokens with sandhi epenthesis were not included in any of the analysis that follows. Epenthesis rate by item: An epenthesis rate was calculated for each noun, by dividing the number of tokens produced as [CVCiC] by the number of tokens produced as either [CVCC] or [CVCiC]. Note that this tally includes certain tokens excluded from the rest of the analysis, namely tokens with a first syllable vowel other than [i] (for example, [kazib] for /kizb/), and tokens for which a given speaker did not produce a usable [CiCiC] verbal match. The tally excludes tokens that were produced with sandhi epenthesis, as well as cases where a speaker skipped a word or produced an incorrect word. Epenthesis rates for each item are given in Table 3. Epenthesis is almost exceptionless in obstruent–sonorant clusters. Sonorant–obstruent and obstruent–obstruent clusters have fairly high rates, even the homorganic clusters /ld/ and /ls/. The lowest rates are for the single voiceless cluster, /sk/, and the single sonorant-sonorant cluster, /lm/. Epenthesis rates by speaker: An epenthesis rate was also calculated for each speaker, by dividing the number of /CVCC/ tokens produced as [CVCiC] by the number of tokens produced as [CVCC] or [CVCiC] (subject to the same conditions mentioned above in the calculation of epenthesis rate by item). The epenthesis rate is included with the synopsis of speaker data, in the first column of Table 6. Speakers’ rates of epenthesis vary from 54% to 100%, with two thirds of the speakers epenthesizing over 90% of the time. As expected from previous research, speakers were not necessarily consistent in whether they produced a given word with epenthesis. Out of 330 sets of eight noun repetitions (22 speakers Â 15 nouns), there are 47 sets (14%) where a speaker produced a given word at least once with epenthesis and at least once without. In nine of these cases, the speaker produced all of one 4-repetition block with epenthesis and the other block without (recall that the two blocks are produced in different halves of the experiment); but in the majority of cases, the inconsistency occurred within a single block. A total of 43 inconsistent 4-sentence blocks were produced. There was no particular pattern as to which repetitions were more likely to have epenthesis: in the 22 blocks where repetitions 1–4 were inconsistent, the epenthesis rates by repetition were 59%, 77%, 38%, and 68%, respectively. In the 21 blocks where repetitions 5–8 were inconsistent, the rates were 60%, 55%, 52%, and 36%. Speakers seemed to simply fluctuate between different valid pronunciations.

3.2. Comparing epenthetic and lexical vowels

The main purpose of the experiment was to compare the formant values and durations of lexical and epenthetic vowels. These results will be presented two ways: first comparing epenthetic and lexical means across speakers, then across items. Some statistical tests were run on ‘type means’, meaning averages of all tokens of an item produced by a speaker. In the usable data, there were 380 unique combinations of item and speaker, forming 190 pairs of type means. Each type mean represents an average of 6.1 repetitions of an item. Formant values have not been normalized for gender, but genders will be separated in some analyses to provide a clearer picture of variation.6 Effects across speakers and items: Table 4 shows mean formant and duration values as calculated with speakers weighted equally (regardless of how many tokens each speaker produced). Epenthetic vowels have higher F1, lower F2, and shorter durations than lexical vowels, although the standard deviations are large enough that there is considerable overlap. The standard deviations for epenthetic and lexical vowels are comparable, meaning that the vowels show around the same level of variability. For each measure, paired t-tests were run to compare the 22 speaker means for epenthetic vowels to the corresponding means for lexical vowels. For F2, there is a highly significant difference between lexical and epenthetic vowels, t ¼ 4:1,p<:001,df ¼ 21. There is no significant difference for F1 or for duration. Table 5 shows the formant and duration means with equal weight given to items, rather than speakers. All trends are in the same direction as seen before: higher F1, lower F2, and shorter duration in epenthetic vowels. For each measure, paired t-tests were run to compare the 15 item means for epenthetic vowels to the 15 corresponding means for lexical vowels. For F2, there is a highly significant difference, t ¼ 10:7,p<:001,df ¼ 14. There is no significant difference for F1 or duration. In short, epenthetic status affects F2, but not F1 or duration, across items and speakers. No effects between items: To examine possible differences between items, two-way ANOVAS were run on all 380 type means, using item and status (epenthetic vs lexical) as independent variables, and duration, first and second formant as dependent variables. All three measures show a significant main effect of item, as would be expected due to coarticulation with different flanking consonants. Only F2 shows an effect of status ðFð1,350Þ¼16:6,p<:001Þ. None of the measures show an interaction between item and status. The ANOVA confirms that epenthetic vowels are characterized by lower F2, and shows that this effect is consistent across items. Since there was no interaction between status and item, the individual items were not further compared. Effects between speakers: To examine possible differences between speakers, two-way ANOVAS were run on the 380 type means, using speaker and status (epenthetic vs lexical) as independent variables, and duration, F1 and F2 as dependent variables. All three measures show

6 According to Adank, Smits, and van Hout (2004, p. 3103), the best methods for normalizing talker/gender while preserving sociophonetic information are those (such as Lobanov, 1971; Nearey, 1978) that incorporate average formant frequencies across all vowel categories for each talker. This would be challenging to implement in my data set. The different talkers seem to have different numbers of vowel categories (possibly ranging from 3 to 5), but it is difﬁcult to be sure because the experiment was not designed to explore their full vowel systems. I.e., if a given speaker sometimes seems to produce [e], it is not clear whether this is a contextual variant of [i], or a separate phoneme. In addition, different speakers seem to have different vowel phonemes in the same lexical items. Thus, ﬁnding accurate average formant frequencies across all vowels for each speaker would not be trivial. Author's personal copy

138 N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143

Table 4 Formant and duration means by lexical status, speakers weighted equally

Lexical Epenthetic D

Mean s.d. Mean s.d. Mean s.d.

Men (n¼9) F1 (Hz) 399 41 408 38 –9 22 F2 (Hz) 1695 132 1590 136 105 95 Duration (ms) 60.9 16.6 59.5 13.5 1.4 3.3

Women (n¼13) F1 (Hz) 479 45 494 47 –14 33 F2 (Hz) 2050 198 1954 138 97 132 Duration (ms) 61.3 15.2 59.9 17.1 1.4 4.1

Table 5 Formant and duration means by lexical status, items weighted equally.

Lexical Epenthetic D

Mean s.d. Mean s.d. Mean s.d.

F1 (Hz) 450 21 458 30 –8 33 F2 (Hz) 1901 61 1799 68 102 37 Duration 59 8 58 9 2 3

Table 6 Data by speaker. Rate: percentage of /CVCC/ produced with epenthesis; df: number of usable pairs the speaker produced, minus one; D: average of lexical formant values minus epenthetic formant values; t and p statistics are for paired t-tests. A star indicates that the difference is signiﬁcant.

Speaker Rate df F1 (Hz) F2 (Hz)

D tp D tp

W1 98 55 2 .2 .839 –19 –1.2 .253 W2 100 21 –70 –6.2 <:001n 366 10.7 <:001n W3 77 45 14 1.8 .079 65 3.3 :002n W4 91 53 –74 –9.8 <:001n 275 9.5 <:001n W5 82 44 –9 –.8 .420 –7 –.3 .788 W6 93 74 4 1.5 .128 46 2.1 :040n W7 93 33 4 .5 .614 8 .1 .885 W8 92 52 17 3.3 :002n –13 –.5 .589 W9 92 63 22 2.1 :038n 50 2.3 :023n W10 98 67 –62 –8.7 <:001n 298 12.7 <:001n W11 75 29 –12 –.8 .449 141 3.0 :006n W12 99 83 –2 –.6 .560 53 4.3 <:001n W13 99 24 –18 –1.8 .080 –6 –.2 .820 M1 93 18 –22 –2.7 :015n 102 3.9 <:002n M2 97 92 –12 –4.5 <:001n 95 8.4 <:001n M3 98 87 0 0 .968 56 2.9 :005n M4 80 39 –6 –.8 .405 144 2.9 :005n M5 78 64 –13 –3.6 <:001n 307 20.3 <:001n M6 54 43 24 3.3 :002n 5 .4 .678 M7 100 58 0 –.1 .954 45 3.3 <:002n M8 96 41 –55 –9.2 <:001n 177 8.9 <:001n M9 86 57 5 .7 .497 13 1.3 .207 a significant main effect of speaker, as would be expected due to talker differences. Both formant values also show significant effects of status: for the first formant, Fð1,336Þ¼7:1, p ¼ :008; for the second formant, Fð1,336Þ¼79:7, p<:001. Both formants also show highly significant interactions between speaker and status: for the first formant, Fð21,336Þ¼2:4, p<:001; for the second formant, Fð21,336Þ¼4:0, p<:001. For duration, there was no effect of status, nor interaction. This means that the speakers, as a group, produce epenthetic and lexical vowels with different qualities, and that some speakers differentiate epenthetic and lexical vowels more than other speakers do. Note that this is the first analysis in which first formant differences were significant. To further explore the variation between speakers, paired t-tests were run on each speaker’s full set of epenthetic and lexical vowel tokens. The dependent variables were F1 and F2; duration was not examined, since it was not significant for the group as a whole. Results for each speaker are given in Table 6. Seventeen of the 22 speakers produce epenthetic and lexical vowels that are significantly different on at least one formant, at the level of p<:05.7

7 No Bonferroni correction has been applied to the t-tests. A Bonferroni correction would be necessary if these tests were being used to falsify the global null hypothesis (namely, that epenthetic and lexical vowels are identical) but the null hypothesis has already been falsiﬁed by the ANOVAs presented above. These t-tests are being used only to sort the speakers into groups of differentiators and non-differentiators. For this purpose, it is not necessary to adjust the sorting criterion based on the total number of speakers in the experiment. Author's personal copy

N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143 139

For eight speakers, both F1 and F2 were significantly different; for seven speakers, only F2 was significant, for two speakers (W8 and M6), only F1 was significant. For all 15 speakers who had significant F2, the difference was in the same direction (epenthetic vowels had lower F2 than lexical). Curiously, three of the 10 speakers who differentiated F1 did so in the opposite of the predominant direction: their epenthetic F1 was significantly higher than lexical F1, while for the other seven speakers it was the reverse. These three speakers included the two who differentiated only F1. This variation between speakers in the direction of the F1 difference could explain why F1 differences were not significant in any of the statistical tests that did not treat speaker as an independent variable. The question arises as to whether speakers who epenthesize often are more or less likely to differentiate the vowels. Pearson correlation tests found no correlation between the speakers’ epenthesis rates and the average difference between their lexical and epenthetic F1 values ðp ¼ :089Þ, nor between epenthesis rates and average differences in F2 values ðp ¼ :700Þ.

3.3. First syllable vowels

Another question is whether first-syllable vowels also differed in [CiCiC] versus [CiC i C] words. To answer this, the beginning and end of each first-syllable vowel was marked in the usable tokens (by a third research assistant, who had not been involved in the second-syllable segmentation). There were six tokens whose first vowels could not be confidently segmented, generally due to devoicing; hence there were only 1158 pairs in the first-vowel analysis. Note that, while second-syllable vowels are matched for both preceding and following consonant, first-syllable vowels are matched only for following consonant, while the preceding consonant usually differs (e.g., [nidim] vs. [ridim]). This proved to complicate the durational data, which will be treated separately from the formant data below. Formant differences:InTable 7, mean formant values have been calculated with speakers weighted equally (regardless of how many tokens each speaker produced). Vowels preceding epenthetic vowels tend to have higher F1 and lower F2 than vowels preceding lexical vowels. The direction of this difference is the same as the difference between epenthetic and lexical vowels themselves, but the magnitude of the F2 differences is much smaller (cf. Table 4). For each measure, paired t-tests were run to compare the 22 subject means for first vowels in [CiCiC] words to the corresponding means for first vowels in [CiCiC] words. The difference was significant for both measures: for F1,t ¼ –3:9,p<:001, df ¼ 21; for F2,t ¼ 2:7,p ¼ :013,df ¼ 21. A similar pattern emerges across items. In Table 8, mean formant values for first vowels have been calculated with items weighted equally. All trends are in the same direction as before; again, the F2 difference is smaller than that in the second syllable. For each measure, paired t-tests were run to compare the 15 environment means for first vowels in [CiCiC] words to the corresponding means for first vowels in [CiCiC] words. The difference was significant for F1, t ¼ –4:1,p ¼ :001, df ¼ 14, and for F2, t ¼ 2:5,p ¼ :026, df ¼ 14. Two-way ANOVAs were run on the type means for first-syllable vowels, with speaker and status (of the second vowel) as independent variables and F1 and F2 as dependent variables. For each formant, there was a main effect of speaker, a main effect of second-vowel status (for first formant, Fð1,336Þ¼7:7,p ¼ :006; for second formant, Fð1,336Þ¼13:1,p<:001Þ, and no interaction between speaker and status. Two-way

Table 7 Formant means for ﬁrst syllable vowels, speakers weighted equally.

[CiCiC] [CiC iC] D

Mean s.d. Mean s.d. Mean s.d.

Men (n¼9) F1 (Hz) 400 38 407 29 –8 11 F2 (Hz) 1646 130 1604 140 42 64 Women (n¼13) F1 (Hz) 468 30 480 36 –12 14 F2 (Hz) 2002 132 1960 147 42 80

Table 8 Formant means for ﬁrst syllable vowels, items weighted equally.

[CiCiC] [CiC iC] D

Mean s.d. Mean s.d. Mean s.d

F1 (Hz) 436 18 449 22 –13 12 F2 (Hz) 1859 109 1792 84 67 104

Table 9 Mean duration in ﬁrst-syllable vowels.

[CiCiC] [CiC iC] D

Mean s.d. Mean s.d. Mean s.d

Speakers weighted equal 47.4 7.4 49.6 8.3 –2.2 3.7 Items weighted equal 46.8 8.2 48.2 6.9 –1.3 9.8 Author's personal copy

140 N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143

ANOVAs were on the type means for first-syllable vowels with item and second-vowel status as independent variables and F1 and F2 as dependent variables. Both formants showed a main effect of item. Only the second formant showed a (marginally) significant effect of status, Fð1,350Þ¼4:1,p ¼ :045. Neither formant showed an interaction. In short, the first-syllable vowel in a [CiCiC] word has a significantly higher F1 and lower F2 than the first vowel in a [CiCiC] word, with no effects between speakers or items. The magnitude of the F2 difference is much smaller than that in the second syllable. Duration in first syllable vowels: The analysis of first-syllable duration proved to be problematic due to segmentation issues. In the full data set, the duration means were slightly longer before epenthetic vowels than before lexical vowels, (Table 9). Yet the very large standard deviations suggest high variation. A 2-way ANOVA with speaker and second-vowel status as independent variables and duration as the dependent variable found a main effect of speaker, Fð21,336Þ¼8:2,p<:001, but no other significant effects. A 2-way ANOVA with item and second-vowel status as independent variables found a main effect of item, Fð14,350Þ¼8:2,p<:001, no main effect of status, and an interaction between item and status, Fð14,350Þ¼6:1,p<:001. To further explore this interaction, the items were examined individually. It emerged that there were two opposing outliers among the item pairs: the first vowel in ½ ilis was on average 20.1 ms longer than that in its match [kilis], and the first vowel in [wilid] was on average 23.6 ms shorter than that in its match [ ilid]. These were the only pairs in the experiment containing a word beginning with [ ], and in each case, the vowel preceded by / / was the longer one. Visual inspection of spectrograms confirmed that boundaries between [ ] and a following vowel are relatively ambiguous in these data: there is often a gradual tapering of frication, offering no abrupt change to guide segmentation. The annotator’s choice of segmentation criteria may have resulted in longer vowel duration readings for words beginning with [ ]. The lack of control for preceding consonants makes the comparison inappropriate. Duration was re-analyzed, excluding the eight pairs with unmatched first consonants. Among the seven true minimal pairs, the average durational difference in first vowels is only .6 ms (items weighted equally), and is insignificant by all tests. I conclude that the presence of epenthetic versus lexical vowels in the second syllable does not affect the duration of the first syllable vowel. Incidentally, the durations of first-syllable vowels (both in [CiCiC] and [CiCiC] words) were measured as shorter than those of second-syllable vowels (cf. Table 5). This could reflect a word-final lengthening effect. However, it should also be borne in mind that the two vowels were marked by different annotators. If their criteria for placing boundaries differed, this could have introduced an entirely artefactual difference. Hence, this comparison should be regarded as suggestive but not reliable.

4. Discussion

This study largely confirms the findings of Gouskova & Hall (2009) that some speakers of Lebanese significantly differentiate their epenthetic and lexical vowels, while others do not. For those speakers who differentiate, the difference is consistent across items. This suggests that the vowels traditionally described as epenthetic do form a unified class in speakers’ phonologies. One unexpected finding was a lack of significant difference in the duration of lexical and epenthetic vowels, contrary to the results of Gouskova & Hall (2009), and also to the impressionistic descriptions of Elihay (2004) and Haddad (1984) (quoted in the introduction). This result may be due to the relatively rapid speech rate speakers used in this experiment. In Gouskova & Hall (2009), the overall vowel durations were longer: 76 ms for epenthetic vowels, 85 ms for lexical, compared to 60ms and 61ms in the current experiment. It is possible that a durational difference exists at slower speech rates only. This study showed more clearly than Gouskova & Hall (2009) that there is variation not only as to whether speakers differentiate the vowels, but as to how strongly they differentiate them and in what direction. Fig. 1 illustrates this graphically, with an arrow from each speaker’s average lexical vowel to his or her average epenthetic vowel (note that only part of the vowel space is shown). We can see that five speakers have rather dramatic differences between the vowels, while the rest range from a small difference to no difference. Yet many of these small differences are significant; 17/22 speakers differentiated at least one formant to the level of p<:05.

300

400 F1

500

600

700

2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 F2

Fig. 1. Arrows connect each speaker’s average lexical [i] to their average epenthetic vowel. Author's personal copy

N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143 141

The five speakers who have large formant differences (W2, W4, W10, M5, and M8) also have two other characteristics in common. First, their lexical /i/s are unusually high and/or front, as seen in Fig. 1. This suggests that their overall vowel space is expanded compared to other speakers. Second, charts of each speaker’s individual epenthetic and lexical vowel tokens reveal relatively little overlap between the two vowel types: see, for example, M5’s chart in Fig. 2. All of these factors suggest that these speakers make a categorical differentiation between their lexical and epenthetic vowels. I will refer to these speakers as categorical differentiators, and transcribe their epenthetic vowels as ½ rather than [i]. By contrast, the speakers who make small yet significant differences tend to have relatively centralized /i/ and to produce clouds of epenthetic and lexical vowels that overlap heavily, as shown for speaker M2 in Fig. 3. I will refer to these speakers as non-categorical differentiators. Among this group, there is variation in the direction of F1 difference; some produce epenthetic vowels with higher F1 than lexical vowels, some with lower F1. Comparison of Tables 2 and 6 shows that there is no obvious demographic pattern as to which speakers differentiate strongly, weakly, or not at all. Variation is found even within a nuclear family: speaker W9 differentiates both F1 and F2; among her four daughters, W6 differentiates only F2, W8 differentiates only F1, and W5 and W7 do not differentiate. It is possible, of course, that some of the variation between speakers is connected to the fact that they currently live in the U.S., where they may have encountered and been influenced by Arabic speakers of other dialects. Ideally, fieldwork should be conducted with a much larger number of speakers within Lebanon in order to gain a more precise picture of sociolinguistic variation. It also remains to be studied whether the epenthetic and lexical vowels produced by each group are perceptually identical or different. Impressionistically, minimal pairs like [misik] ‘he grasped’ and [misik] ‘musk’ seem to sound the same from speakers but not from others, but more a systematic perceptual study is needed to confirm this.

speaker M5 200

250 x x x

x 300 x x x x x xx F1 x x x x x xx x x x x x xxxxxxx x x x xx xxx 350 x x xxxxx x x xx x x xx xx xxx x x x 400

450

500

2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000

Fig. 2. Speaker M5: a signiﬁcant and categorical differentiator. Epenthetic vowels are shown as circles, lexical vowels as Â .

speaker M2 300

x 350 x x x x xx x x x x x x x x x xxxxx x x x xx x xxx x xx xx F1 x xxxxx x xx x x xx x x xxx x xx xxx xx 400 x x x x xx x x x xx x x x xx x x x x x x x x 450 x

500

2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 F2

Fig. 3. Speaker M2: a signiﬁcant but non-categorical differentiator. Epenthetic vowels are shown as circles, lexical vowels as Â . Author's personal copy

142 N. Hall / Journal of Phonetics 41 (2013) 133–143

This study also demonstrated that there is a signiﬁcant quality difference between the ﬁrst-syllable vowels in [CiCiC] and [CiCiC] words. This difference is in the same direction as the difference between the second-syllables vowels: an [i] in the syllable before an epenthetic vowel is more centralized than an [i] in the syllable before a lexical [i]. The magnitude of the difference is smaller than the difference between second-syllable vowels, especially in F2, which suggests that anticipatory coarticulation with the second vowel might be the cause. Relevance to phonological opacity: As noted in the" Introduction, Levantine epenthesis is famous largely because it participates in opaque phonological interactions (e.g., exceptional stress in words like [ li:bis:na], exceptional vowel shortening in words like [jabiP]). In this context, it is interesting to note that Kawahara (2002), Anttila (2006),andEttinger (2007) have argued that there is an inherent connection between opacity and variation. While the details vary, these proposals agree that opaque interactions often arise in situations where a transparent variant exists as well, either as a stylistic or sociolinguistic variant, and that the existence of the transparent variants is crucial in the survival of the opaque variants. Levantine is not usually cited as an example of this. For" Levantine epenthesis, the only kind of transparent variant usually" reported is the form without epenthesis. E.g., when ‘our musk’ is pronounced [ mi:sik:na], the stress placement is opaque, but if it is pronounced [ misk:na], the stress placement is transparent. However, this kind of transparent variant has a very limited occurrence; it does not exist for the many words where epenthesis is more or less obligatory. This study suggests that a second, more widespread kind of variant exists for other words with epenthesis: a form in which the epenthetic vowel is acoustically distinct from lexical vowels. Underlyingly /CiCC/ words occur with a different range of pronunciations than underlyingly /CiCiC/ words, as shown in (4).

‘held’ misik (4) ‘musk’ misik, mis k, misk

The experiment only examined epenthetic vowels in one position (ﬁnal" CC). But assuming, for the sake of argument, that some speakers differentiate" epenthetic vowels in every position, then a pronunciation like [ mi:s k:na] can be" analyzed as a transparent variant of the opaque [ mi:sik:na]. It is possible to construct surface-true, non-opaque rules for stress placement in [ mi:s k:na], by referring to the [ ] quality. While the full development of such a grammar is beyond the scope of this paper, a sample of such a rule is given below:

(5) Traditional stress rule: stress final CVCC or CVVC; else stress CVC or CVV penult; else stress antepenult. [This rule must be ordered before epenthesis.] Adjusted stress rule: if [ ] occurs in one of the final two syllables, stress the syllable before the schwa; else stress final CVCC or CVVC; else stress CVC or CVV penult; else stress antepenult. [Ordering with respect to epenthesis does not matter.]

" The adjusted rule is admittedly inelegant, but it is descriptively adequate." It works both for words with epenthesis in the penult, like [ mi:s k:na], and for words with epenthesis in the ﬁnal syllable, like [ka: ta:b t] ‘I wrote’. Similar adjustments could be made for other rules (syncope, vowel shortening) that are usually described as interacting opaquely with epenthesis. It is worth at least considering that speakers might notice such surface generalizations and refer to them in constructing their phonological grammar. Near merger, not incomplete neutralization: A second question this study bears upon is how to explain the non-categorical differentiators, who produce an epenthetic vowel that overlaps heavily with their lexical [i]. Gouskova & Hall (2009) describe and analyze this phenomenon as a type of incomplete neutralization, meaning that the surface phonetics retain a trace of an underlying distinction between /i/ and zero. However, if all speakers have the same distinction in their underlying representations—and we have seen no evidence to the contrary—then it is not clear why some speakers would show incomplete neutralization and others not. The present study suggests a different answer: that non-categorical differentiation might be better analyzed as a near-merger of two sociolinguistic variants. In this view, non-categorical differentiators have been exposed both to [i]-epenthesizers and [ ]-epenthesizers, and their own epenthetic vowel is inﬂuenced by both. This analysis has the advantage of not requiring different phonetic implementation mechanisms in different speakers; instead, it simply requires that different speakers have been exposed to different dialects, a far less problematic assumption. The reader is referred to Yu (2007) for a relevant analysis of near-mergers in exemplar theory.

5. Conclusion

This study has shown that there is a considerable variation across speakers in the production of epenthetic vowels in Lebanese Arabic, with some speakers producing an epenthetic vowel that is identical to lexical [i], some producing epenthetic [ ], and some producing an intermediate vowel that heavily overlaps with [i]. No variation across items was found. The existence of variant forms may be relevant to understanding the phonological phenomenon of opacity, and the phonetic phenomenon of near-merger.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ghada Khattab, Maria Gouskova, Ron Artstein, and Louis Goldstein for invaluable help in planning this experiment; to Nour Kweider, Stacey Porter and Jed Pizarro-Guevara for assistance in data collection and analysis; to Bruce Hayes, Kie Zuraw, and Robert Daland for discussion and feedback; and to the Scholarly and Creative Activities Committee at CSULB for funding, and to the associate editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1125164.

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