Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Moroccan Arabic Word-initial Geminates
MASUKO Yukie and RATCLIFFE Robert R.

It is generally agreed that Moroccan Arabic (MA) has lost a length distinction in the vowels while length is distinctive in both vowels and consonants in Classical Arabic and in most Arabic dialects. In MA, etymological short vowels are lost in most environments which results in the emergence of consonant clusters or consonant geminates.
The purpose of this paper examines the acoustic phonetic characteristics of geminates of MA which is said to have phonemic word-initial geminates as well as intervocalic and word-final ones.
A set of words with a word-initial geminate or a singleton consonant is phonetically examined, and then the consonantal duration is measured to have following results:
(1) Geminates which have no precedent vowel insertion are voiceless fricatives and voiceless affricates followed by a voiceless fricative. Besides, free variants with geminates with an inserted vowel are observed.
(2) No clear distinction in the duration is observed between affricate geminates and single consonants, in sentence-initial and word-initial position or inter-sentential position. Obviously long geminates sometimes appear while long singleton consonants do spontaneously in utterances: there is no consistency in the duration of affricates.
(3) In the sentence-initial position, there is no clear-cut durational distinction between voiceless stop geminates without vowel insertion and singleton ones. In most of the inter-sentential positions, geminates are longer than singleton counterparts.
(4) Voiced stops in the sentence-initial position are mostly preceded by an inserted vowel, where the length of duration of the precedent vowel and silent period of the stop is longer than that of noise period in singleton one.
(5) As for the fricatives, nasals, approximants and trills, duration of geminates are longer than their singleton counterparts.