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home / papers / 2016 / L'impact des variations temporelles intrinsèques et extrinsèques de la voyelle sur la relation consonne-voyelle : Étude translinguistique sur l'arabe jordanien et le français (The impact of extrinsic and intrisic vowel temporal variations on the consonant-vowel relationship : A trans-linguistic investigation on Jordanian Arabic and French)

L'impact des variations temporelles intrinsèques et extrinsèques de la voyelle sur la relation consonne-voyelle : Étude translinguistique sur l'arabe jordanien et le français (The impact of extrinsic and intrisic vowel temporal variations on the consonant-vowel relationship : A trans-linguistic investigation on Jordanian Arabic and French)

Paper · 2016 · Mohammad Abuoudeh and Olivier Crouzet

Summary

The paper asks whether two different sources of vowel duration change affect stop–vowel acoustics in the same way. The first is intrinsic: the phonological short/long vowel contrast in Jordanian Arabic. The second is extrinsic: speaking-rate changes in French. In the Arabic experiment, seven male speakers read CVC words with a target stop (/b,d,g,t,k/) and short or long /i,a,u/, placed in a carrier sentence. Items appeared in random order and each was repeated ten times. A parallel French experiment varied speaking rate across fast, medium and slow conditions. For each token the authors measured vowel duration and the first three formants at vowel onset and midpoint. They then fitted locus equations, which regress F2 at onset on F2 at midpoint, to quantify consonant–vowel coarticulation. In both languages, shorter vowels pushed formants toward a central frequency region and produced steeper locus-equation slopes with lower intercepts, meaning stronger CV overlap. The vowel was affected more than the consonant, and the effect was clearer for Arabic length than for French rate. The work suggests that length contrast and speaking rate converge on a shared duration-driven mechanism of coarticulation.

Key points

  • Arabic data: 7 Jordanian men aged 27–35 from Ma'an, Amman and Jerash; 80 real CVC words; 5 stops × 2 positions × 6 vowels × 10 repetitions, giving 600 tokens per speaker.
  • Vowel durations: Long vowels were roughly 135–162 ms and short ones roughly 77–90 ms, a significant difference (F(1,4) = 57.92, p < 0.01).
  • Processing pipeline:
    • Praat with manual segmentation.
    • Burg LPC formant tracking with a 25 ms window and a 6.25 ms step.
    • Smoothing with a two-point moving average.
    • Analysis in R.
    • Stimuli presented by a Python/Pygame script with pyfribidi for right-to-left text.
  • Outlier handling: Regression points were dropped when their residual exceeded the mean absolute residual plus 1.5 standard deviations, and the regressions were then refitted. About 7% of the data was excluded.
  • Locus-equation results: Short vowels and faster speech gave higher slopes and lower intercepts. Alveolars /d,t/ were the most resistant to vowel context, velars split into front-vowel and back-vowel clusters, and bilabials showed the weakest consonant influence on the vowel.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Separating intrinsic from extrinsic causes: The paper keeps duration that is built into the unit (phonological length) apart from duration imposed by context (speech rate), then checks whether both shift the outcome the same way. This is a clean way to tell lexical properties apart from situational ones.
  • I2. A relational invariant instead of absolute values: A locus equation describes a stop by the linear relation between two measurements rather than by a single fixed value. This stays stable across vowel contexts where raw cues drift.
  • I3. One interpretable number for coupling strength: The regression slope summarises how strongly one unit depends on its neighbour, from 0 (independent) to 1 (fully shaped by the neighbour).
  • I4. Residual-based outlier pruning with a refit: The authors fit once, remove points whose residuals pass a mean-plus-1.5-SD threshold, and fit again, so a few extreme tokens do not distort the summary slopes.
  • I5. Controlled carrier frames with randomised order: Each target word sits in a fixed carrier sentence and is shown in random order with repetitions, which isolates the variable under study from context and ordering effects.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): The tagger and morphology could record whether a feature, such as tense or number, comes from the lexeme itself or from the surrounding construction. Error analysis could then tell whether failures are lexical or contextual.
  • I2 (world): Measures and values in the knowledge layer could be stored as relations between quantities, such as rate = amount/time, rather than as fixed numbers, so they hold up when the context changes.
  • I3 (tree): The same kind of slope could measure how much a token's parser decision depends on its head's features, as an explainable diagnostic of contextual coupling.
  • I4 (learn): Silver data from witness parsers could be filtered the same way. Training a first pass, removing examples with abnormal loss, and retraining would stop a few noisy agreements from dominating.
  • I5 (answer): Test suites for readers could put target constructions into fixed carrier sentences, shuffled and repeated, so accuracy differences can be traced to the construction rather than to the surrounding text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 worksMedicine · 80 worksPhysiology · 11 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 worksFrench · 65 works

Cite

Cite as Mohammad Abuoudeh and Olivier Crouzet. 2016. L'impact des variations temporelles intrinsèques et extrinsèques de la voyelle sur la relation consonne-voyelle : Étude translinguistique sur l'arabe jordanien et le français (The impact of extrinsic and intrisic vowel temporal variations on the consonant-vowel relationship : A trans-linguistic investigation on Jordanian Arabic and French). Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016. volume 1 : JEP.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{abuoudeh2016l,
  title = {{L'impact des variations temporelles intrinsèques et extrinsèques de la voyelle sur la relation consonne-voyelle : Étude translinguistique sur l'arabe jordanien et le français (The impact of extrinsic and intrisic vowel temporal variations on the consonant-vowel relationship : A trans-linguistic investigation on Jordanian Arabic and French)}},
  author = {Mohammad Abuoudeh and Olivier Crouzet},
  booktitle = {Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016. volume 1 : JEP},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2016.jeptalnrecital-jep.42/}
}

References

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