Acoustic and electromagnetic articulographic study of pharyngealisation

The present chapter deals with the coarticulatory effects of the contrast of pharyngealisation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The first part of the study reports acoustic data, based on locus equation (LE) parameters extracted from the production of sixteen subjects from Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan and Morocco who spoke 24 words in MSA and 24 words in DA, with a symmetrical VCV context [iCi, uCu, aCa] where C was either pharyngealised /t^ˁ, d^ˁ, s^ˁ, ð^ˁ/ or non-pharyngealised /t, d, s, ð/. LE parameters were found to accurately reflect pharyngealisation patterns of CV coarticulatory effects according to speech variety and geographical clustering. The second part of the study deals with EMA data from one Tunisian speaker. It provides some observations of the articulatory mechanism of pharyngealisation. This section provides also a comprehensive interpretation of the coarticulatory effects of pharyngealisation as revealed by locus equation parameters.