Voice Onset Time of Initial Stops in Najdi Arabic

The voice onset time (VOT), which indicates the durational interval from the stop release to the start of the voicing of the following vowel, has long been a prominent research topic in the field of acoustic phonetics. It has shown to be a reliable universal acoustic parameter in discriminating the stop consonants in numerous languages, like English, German, Korean, and various Arabic varieties. It also has been claimed that other factors, such as place of articulation, gender, and vocalic contexts, may affect the productions of the VOTs of the stop categories. Therefore, the present study aims to examine the VOT values of the Najdi Arabic (NA) stops, particularly the plain stop consonants /b, d, g, t, k/, and the potential effects of the place of articulation, gender, and vocalic contexts on their production. Sixty male and female native NA speakers were recruited in this study. The findings revealed that NA has two types of VOTs- positive VOTs with the voiceless stops and negative VOTs with the voiced stops. They also showed that the VOTs of the NA stops become longer when the articulators move back to the oral cavity and shorter in the front cavity. Lastly, the findings reported that the VOTs with short vowels are significantly shorter than the VOTs with long vowels and that gender does not affect the VOTs of the voiced stops, but does affect the VOTs of their voiceless counterparts. Hopefully, the conclusions reached in this study contribute to a better understanding of this interesting acoustic parameter and to the less acoustic literature on Arabic and its various varieties.