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Part of
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2015
Edited by Hamid Ouali
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 5] 2017
► pp. 89–126

Chapter 4
Perceptual mapping between Arabic and English consonants

| Florida State University
| University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The current study attempts to establish perceptual category mapping between Arabic and English consonants in the minds of native speakers of American English who have no experience or exposure to Arabic. American listeners participated in an identification task and goodness-of-fit rating task to establish perceptual category mappings between the tested Arabic consonants and the English categories. Prosodic location and vowel effects (quality and duration) were considered as factors that might affect the perception of Arabic consonants. The results show no prosodic location effect between the two tested syllable structures, CV and VCV. However, a vowel effect is shown for some of the tested Arabic consonants, which affected the English category selection and the degrees of fit.

Keywords: phonology and phonetics, Arabic consonants, perceptual mapping, second language learning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • Background on Arabic sounds
  • 2.Methods
    • Talkers
    • Listeners
    • Stimuli
    • Arabic stimuli
    • English stimuli
    • Recording and processing the stimuli
    • Procedure
    • Identification and goodness-of-fit rating tasks
    • Analysis
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.5.05lab
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