Acoustics and Articulation of Medial versus Final Coronal Stop Gemination Contrasts in Moroccan Arabic

This paper presents results of a simultaneous acoustic and articulatory investigation of word-medial and word-final geminate/singleton coronal stop contrasts in Moroccan Arabic (MA). The acoustic analysis revealed that, only for the word-medial contrast, the two MA speakers adopted comparable strategies in contrasting geminates with singletons, mainly by significantly lengthening closure duration in geminates, relative to singletons. In word-final position, two speaker-specific contrasting patterns emerged. While one speaker also lengthened the closure duration for final geminates, the other speaker instead lengthened only the release duration for final geminates, relative to singletons. Consonant closure and preceding vowel were significantly longer for the geminate only in medial position, not in final position. These temporal differences were even more clearly delineated in the articulatory signal, captured via ultrasound, to which we applied the novel approach of using TRACTUS [Temporally Resolved Articulatory Configuration Tracking of UltraSound: 15] to index temporal properties of closure gestures for these geminate/singleton contrasts.